


Tessellate

by tinywoodenrobot



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Breath Play/Choking, Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Constipation, F/M, Grimmjow is bored and a little lonely, Ichigo is a little bit of a moron, Sadomasochism, Smut, What happens when a lonely masochist meets a lonely sadomasochist? This fic, gratuitous use of the word fuck, if you're a canon purist please skip this fic, irresponsible use of Reiatsu, it's basically canon that Grimmjow is swinging a tree trunk between his legs, many many artistic liberties were taken, mellowed-out Grimmjow
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:55:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 36,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29664159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinywoodenrobot/pseuds/tinywoodenrobot
Summary: Tessellate (of shapes, especially polygons): to fit together closely without gaps or overlapping.
Relationships: Grimmjow Jaegerjaques/Original Female Character(s), Inoue Orihime/Kurosaki Ichigo, Kurosaki Ichigo/Original Female Character
Comments: 19
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I took canon and put it in a blender with my own ideas.

“Umi, your hot weirdo is in again.” 

Umi doesn’t even bother to look up. She’s concentrating on the till, trying to make sure she doesn’t miss anyone’s drinks. The table in the corner has been ordering nonstop all evening, and she knows that if she isn’t careful, they’ll take advantage of the chaos and use her distraction as a means to slip away with a couple of free drinks. “He’s hot, but he’s not my weirdo,” she mumbles.

Hitoka nudges her shoulder. “This is your bar,” she states. “And he has come in three nights in a row now.”

“So he likes the drinks,” Umi shrugs. She points to herself with a thumb. “Top shelf mixologist, remember?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s interested in your shelf,” Hitoka snarks, wiggling her eyebrows and shooting a pointed glance at Umi’s tight white tee. “Just not the one with the drinks on it.” 

“If you’re lacking work to do,” Umi laughs, “I can give you something to keep you busy.”

“Changing the subject again, I see.” 

Umi doesn’t deign to answer her. Instead, she makes her way over to the end of the bar. The man’s eyes aren’t on her, yet she gets the feeling he can see her coming anyway. “Can I get you another drink?” She asks him politely, offering him her friendly boss-of-the-house smile.

He trains those pretty, bright blue eyes of his on her face. “This is your place,” he surmises. 

“Yes,” Umi confirms. “I’m the owner of this bar.” She doesn’t think his intention is to make trouble, but she puts herself on guard just in case. A quick appraisal of him, and she’s mentally catalogued his height, weight, and build. _He’s a big guy,_ she thinks, _but if I needed to throw him out quickly, I could probably manage it myself._

Blue Eyes is studying her. She wants to ask him about it - that section of the right side of his jaw that’s partially covered with what looks like half of a skeletal mask. She doesn’t, though; after all, he’s not a regular, and she’s sure he must be holding back his curiosity about why her face is painted to resemble a skull. 

“So can I get you another?” She asks it again, softening her voice. 

“Yeah,” he answers. His voice is deep and rough, his tone that of a man who isn’t used to being denied anything. She turns to get his drink, but her movement is stilled when he reaches out to encircle her wrist with his hand. His grip isn’t particularly tight, but Umi can feel the power in it all the same. It’s raw strength, and there is something else beneath it - something she hasn’t felt in a long time.

 _Spiritual pressure… Almost like he’s suppressing this immense amount of spiritual pressure._ The thought is faint, and she tries not to let her surprise show on her face as she turns toward him again. “Excuse me—”

“When you bring my drink back,” he says, his voice low and quiet, “you can help me with something else.”

“And what would that be?” She hardens her voice. She isn’t snatching her wrist away just yet; she doesn’t want to cause a scene. But she flashes him a warning look.

It only makes him laugh. “I’m looking for someone,” he grins. “And I think the quickest way to find him is through you.” His thumb is on her pulse, pressing into the steady beat of blood there.

“You must be mistaken.” Umi twists her wrist in his grasp, successfully freeing it. “I believe I would have remembered if you and I were in the same social circle.” She backs up a few inches, squaring her shoulders and looking him directly in the eye. “So I can get you that drink if you still want it. If not, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

One pale blue eyebrow goes up. He grins again, and Umi once more feels that unmistakable spike in spiritual pressure.

“Listen,” she starts, making her voice low and harsh as she leans over. “This is my bar. I don’t know who you are or who you’re looking for, and frankly I don’t give two shits. But know this: I will not hesitate to throw you out on your ass if you try anything funny.”

Her words don’t seem to surprise him. “Kurosaki Ichigo,” he says quietly, those bright blue eyes piercing her steely gaze. “Where is he?”

Umi feels like the wind has been knocked out of her. “What the fuck do you want with him?”

He flashes her a self-satisfied smile. “Thought so.” He stands up, leaning forward and dragging a finger along her collarbone. “I’ll come back at closing time so we can discuss this more,” he says. Those bright, sharp eyes slide over to the other end of the bar, where Hitoka is trying to be inconspicuous about watching them. His voice drops in tone and volume when he speaks again. “This stays between you and me.” 

The cold flint in his eyes is an easy indication that he is likely very much capable of killing someone, and won’t hesitate to do so if provoked. Still, she doesn’t think it would help her cause to let him think he’s completely snatched the upper hand from her. She nods, flashing him a cold smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Don’t take this to mean I’m tacitly complying with whatever you’re after,” she starts, her own voice hard. “But I’ll be goddamned if you cause a scene here. So come back at closing time, and you’d better be ready to tell me exactly what the fuck is going on,” she continues. “Or else we’ll see who’ll be killing who.” 

“Heh,” he chuckles, leaning back and looking at her appraisingly. “You’re mouthy as fuck - I like you. I think when I’m finished with my business here, I’m gonna come back here and play with you.” 

She watches him go, breathing deeply in an effort to calm herself. Hitoka is at her side in an instant. 

“What the hell was that?” Hitoka’s eyes are on his retreating form. “The two of you looked downright cozy for a second there.”

Umi turns to her friend with a smile. “Flirting,” she shrugs. “He asked me out.”

“...and you said yes?” The younger woman shakes her head. “I’m dubious. You never date patrons. What did he say?”

Dismissively, she waves an arm. “He said he liked my face paint.”

“Lame,” Hitoka laughs. “I mean, yes, your face paint is awesome. But I thought you’d make him work a little harder than that.”

“He’s hot,” Umi shrugs again. “Anyway,” she goes on, clapping a hand on Hitoka’s shoulder, “less talking, more pouring.” 

“Okay, okay,” Hitoka grumbles. “You’re the boss.” 

*******

As she goes about the business of closing up, questions keep swimming around Umi’s thoughts. _Who is he, and what does he want with Ichigo?_ It puzzles her - she hasn’t had contact with Ichigo in years. She’s kept tabs on him, sure - she wasn’t invited to the wedding, but she knows that May 11th will be his and Orihime’s second anniversary; she knows that he took over running the family clinic when his father left Karakura; she even knows that they named their son Kazui, and that he should be celebrating his first birthday this summer. 

_Whoever he is,_ Umi thinks, _his information is outdated if he thinks I’m the one who can lead him to Ichigo._ That old, familiar bitterness lays its icy hands on her heart, and she curses herself for giving into it, even momentarily. 

“You should be more careful about locking your doors, you know.” 

She whirls around at the sound of his voice. She hadn’t heard his footsteps. “I somehow get the feeling a locked door would not deter you,” she remarks dryly. 

“You’re not wrong,” he chuckles. He motions to the empty bar around them. “Where’s your nosy underling?” 

_Underling? Who the fuck calls it that?_ “I sent her - and everyone else - home,” Umi replies. “I don’t know what you want, but it’s obvious there’s no need to involve anyone other than me.”

He walks toward her, his steps slow and measured. “I told you,” he starts, maneuvering himself into the space behind the bar. “I’m looking for Kurosaki.”

He’s much too close to her. Taller than he looked at first, he towers over her, invading her personal space. Umi knows he’s using his size to try and intimidate her. She refuses to let him. “And what makes you think you can find him through me?” She asks, looking up into his face challengingly, not budging an inch from her position. 

“I don’t think either of us wants me to waste time answering that question.” The words are followed with a chuckle. “I know who you are, Yamaya Umi, and you know what you are to him.”

“What I _was_ to him,” she snaps, forgetting herself for a second. “I’m nothing to him now. I haven’t seen or spoken to Ichigo in years.” She pushes past him. “So I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

He studies her for a moment. “Aren’t you even the slightest bit curious why I’m looking for him?”

“No,” Umi says flatly. “Because I can’t help you.”

The sudden rush of air around her disorients her for a moment. It’s a familiar sound, a familiar feeling, but somehow slightly different from the way she knew it before, years ago. Flash Step is what the Shinigami called it. Ishida said the Quincies called it Hirenkyaku. 

She wonders what it’s called where he’s from. 

When he appears in front of her, she sighs. “Who are you?” She would be lying if she said she isn’t at least a little curious. 

“Former Sexta Espada,” he grins, his blue eyes sharp. “Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez.”

“That’s quite a name,” Umi manages, trying to ignore the wild thumping of her heart against her rib cage. _An Espada?_

Grimmjow is watching her closely. “You know what an Espada is.” It’s not a question. “But my name isn’t familiar to you.”

“I’ve… heard about the Espada, and the arrancar, and Hueco Mundo,” she admits. “I don’t know anything other than the little bit I was told, years ago.”

“From Kurosaki.”

“Why are you looking for him?” 

“I thought you said you didn’t care.”

Umi hesitates; he has her there. “I don’t,” she says after a moment. “And I can’t help you. Sorry.” She turns away again.

“He mentioned you,” Grimmjow starts. “During the last big fight I had with him. He told me all about you.” He chuckles. “I fucked him up, badly, and he just kept getting up. Said you were waiting for him in the living world and he’d promised he’d come back to you.”

The words are like a knife; they slide between her ribs to puncture her heart, and she finds herself gasping for breath. That old, familiar bitterness rises up to greet her again. It tastes like bile, and for a moment Umi worries that she might vomit in front of him. She closes her eyes and inhales deeply, trying to re-center herself. After a moment, the urge to vomit passes, and she fixes her gaze on Grimmjow again. 

“He’s hiding his spiritual pressure from me somehow,” Grimmjow goes on. “I don’t know how, but I know I haven’t been able to sense him since I came to the living world.” He grins at her. “You, on the other hand… you’re like a fucking lighthouse.”

“Like I told you before,” she starts slowly, turning away from him, “I haven’t seen or spoken to Ichigo in years. I don’t know where he is.”

“One of those things is true,” Grimmjow muses. “But I think it’s pointless to lie about the other.” 

“What makes you think I know where he is?”

“That look on your face,” he says simply. “Is that why you cover your face in paint? Because you do a shit job of hiding what you’re feeling?” He laughs at her, and to Umi’s ears, it sounds derisive. 

“Fuck you,” she snaps. 

He’s appraising her again. “Yeah,” he grins casually. “I can see why he liked you. Matching tempers, hm?”

Umi doesn’t answer him. 

“Look,” he starts. “All you have to do is tell me where he is, and I promise you’ll never have to see me again if you don’t want to.” 

“Why don’t you go ask one of Ichigo’s friends?” Umi shrugs. “There are other people in his life, you know.” 

“Alternatively, I could force it out of you.” She looks at him sharply, catching the sadistic gleam in his eye. “Asking nicely doesn’t seem to be working, so maybe it’s time I moved on to more… persuasive methods.” 

He uses his Flash Step again - _Sonido,_ she remembers. _Ichigo said_ _the Espada called it Sonido_ \- this time pinning her between himself and the edge of the bar. “It’s a pity Kurosaki never told you about me,” he muses thoughtfully, his eyes on his right hand as he brings it up and curls his fingers around her throat. 

“Stop,” she manages, struggling against his grasp. His fingers dig into her skin, cutting off her air supply. Umi claws at his arm, her eyes flashing. His fingers curl tighter, and her eyes start to water. She puts her hand over his, summoning some of her Reiatsu, feeling a jolt of satisfaction when his eyes widen in surprise as the cloth covering his arm bursts into blue flames. 

“Bastard,” he hisses through gritted teeth, releasing her throat and shoving her away. 

It doesn’t take him long to put the flames out, but in the time that he is preoccupied with doing so, Umi has brought her palms together and uttered a short incantation under her breath. When Grimmjow looks up at her again, he is met with the sight of her pointing a ball of blue flame at his head. 

“I’d really prefer not to destroy the bar that I love so much,” she starts, her eyes cold. “But if you try anything like that again, I’ll burn this whole damned building down to kill you.”

He looks impressed, but not - to Umi’s dismay - frightened. She gets the feeling he really is only toying with her - not even using a fraction of the power at his disposal. The thought frightens her a bit. “Seems I underestimated you,” he grins. “Although I should have expected nothing less.” He shrugs. “I’ll tell you this: I’m looking for Kurosaki because he and I have some unfinished business.”

Umi eyes him warily. “What kind of unfinished business?”

“You said you didn’t care.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Too bad,” he laughs. “My unfinished business stays between me and Kurosaki. All I need you to do is tell me where I can find him.”

She keeps her mouth closed.

“Suit yourself,” he replies nonchalantly, looking her up and down. “I’ll be here every night from now on, until you change your mind.” He starts toward the door, then pauses and turns to face her again. “Maybe we can play some more later.” And with another grin, he’s gone. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Seems like you have a lot to learn about human women," she says, her voice quiet in the still semi-darkness. 
> 
> "What for?" Got no use for them." He grins and shifts again, leaning back against the wall once more. 
> 
> "And yet, you keep turning up like a bad penny, wanting me to help you find Ichigo," Umi points out.

_ “Ichigo…” Umi sighs, half in exasperation and half in amusement. “I swear sometimes it feels like you fight with the goal of making my life as difficult as possible.” She pauses, examining the bruised skin over his rib cage. “Some of these wounds… how did you even get them?” _

_ He laughs, even though she knows it must hurt him to do so. “By being too slow.” _

_ She shoots him a withering look. “Ichigo…” She’s unaware of the second sigh that slips past her lips - a sigh of despair. “I’m terrified that one of these days, you just… won’t come back.”  _

_ “It’s fine, Umi, really,” he insists softly, reaching up with his uninjured arm to cup her cheek in his palm. “It’s okay. As long as I know you’ll be here waiting for me, I’ll always come back.” _

*******

She jolts awake, the dream-memory leaving her with a keen sense of longing that’s almost like a physical pain in her heart. She can still hear Ichigo’s words, and she still remembers the way she felt when he made that promise to her. 

But it wasn’t a forever promise, and it was only to tell her goodbye that he came back that last time. It was Orihime whose arms he went to, Orihime who held Ichigo’s heart in the palm of her hand. There was something in that gentle, kind woman that Umi had never been able to cultivate within herself. Something that tethered Ichigo to Orihime even before Umi had ever set eyes on him. It was a battle Umi had been destined to lose from the beginning. 

She has often wondered if knowing that ahead of time would have kept her from falling in love with him. It’s a question she has been unable to answer. 

“Maybe it was just my fucking luck,” she breathes into the silence of her dark, empty bedroom. 

“You make it a habit to talk to yourself?”

Startled, Umi jumps. She knows that voice; she remembers it from the bar. Deep and gravelly, it would be hard to forget. She doesn’t need to see his face to know who is there with her. “How did you get into my home?” 

“Like you said, locked doors don’t stop me.” 

He’s sitting on the edge of her desk, looking for all the world like he owns the place as moonlight from the window bathes him in shadow. He’s dressed as he has been for the last few days - completely in black with that white jacket over it all. Umi tries to ignore how handsome he is in profile, but it’s easier said than done. He’s hot, effortlessly so, and she wonders if he realizes just how much sex appeal he oozes. 

She shakes her head, clearing that train of thought from her brain before it can go any further.

“Why are you here?” Umi reaches over and turns on the lamp. Soft yellow light floods that side of the room, and she sits up in bed, swinging her legs over the edge and planting them firmly on the floor.

“No need to get up on my account.” Grimmjow grins, lazily looking her up and down. “So that’s what you look like when your face isn’t painted all to hell.” He pauses. “Why do you wear that, anyway?”

“I don’t always,” she rebuts. “Sometimes it’s a mask.” She motions to the fragment of bone on his jaw. “Why do you wear that? Aren’t you in a gigai?”

He shrugs. “My real one is a part of me. When I got this gigai, I had it made with a mask to look like it.” He pauses, clawing at the fragment of bone and peeling it away from his face. “You like me better without it?” He flashes her a feral grin. 

“Bold of you to assume I like you at all.”

He laughs. “Fair enough… but you didn’t answer my question. Why the face paint? Why the mask?”

She sighs, fiddling with the edge of her comforter. “I don’t know anymore,” she admits, wondering why she finds herself telling this volatile stranger the odd truth. “I started wearing them after Ichigo… a couple years ago,” she corrects herself. “It became sort of a signature of mine when I opened the bar. I think it helped me feel… confident, I guess. And once I started the habit, it was hard to break out of it.” 

“What happened between you and Kurosaki?”

She pads over to a cabinet in the corner of her bedroom. She can feel Grimmjow’s eyes on her… those bright blues sliding over her body, watching her every move, and Umi halfheartedly wonders if she should have put on something a little more decent than her scanty sleepwear. _Who cares,_ she thinks. _A little T and A never killed anybody, and_ _I’m sure he’s seen much more than what I’m showing._ She grabs a bottle of amber colored liquid and a glass. Halfway back to the bed, she pauses and turns around to grab another glass. Grimmjow watches as she pours the alcohol into both glasses, handing him one. 

He looks at it dubiously. “What’s this?” 

“It’s brandy,” she snaps. “And you don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to.” Pointedly, she takes a large swig from her own glass. “You’re not important enough to me to poison.” 

The blue-haired Espada laughs. “You really are fun to play with.” His eyes follow her back to her bed, his tongue sliding suggestively back and forth on the rim of his glass. Umi tries to ignore it. “So,” he starts again, unwilling to let the topic go. “What happened between you and Kurosaki?” He shifts on her desk, leaning back against the wall. “Last I heard, he was all hot between the balls to get back to you.”

“Did you come here to gossip?” She hurls the words at him, but there is surprisingly little vitriol behind them. 

“Well,” Grimmjow starts thoughtfully. “You don’t seem to want to tell me where he is, even though I’m positive you know. It’s obvious something happened between the two of you. And while I’m waiting for you to lead me to him, I might as well find out what that something was.”

It’s a more sincere and direct answer than Umi was expecting, and it gives her pause.

“And don’t tell me you don’t wanna talk about it,” Grimmjow chuckles. “Because I get the feeling you very much wanna talk about it.” 

“It’s simple,” Umi says finally, polishing off the brandy in her glass and pouring another. “He got tired of me.” 

“Tired of you? And that body?” His eyebrows go up. “That seems unlikely.” 

Umi flips her middle finger up at him. “Crass, and rude, and totally inappropriate.”

“But not untrue,” Grimmjow supplies. “Although if the orange-haired woman is who he left you for, I guess it means Kurosaki’s more of a tits man than an ass man.” 

“You can leave at any time,” Umi snaps.

She isn’t sure why those are the words that get him to pipe down, but they do. “Sorry,” he grins, even though there is nothing apologetic or even vaguely sheepish in his tone. “Go on. You said he got tired of you. Why?”

“I don’t know for sure, because I never got an explanation from him. But if I had to guess, I would say it’s because I was just one more turbulent thing in his life,” she utters quietly. “And I couldn’t center him. Not the way he needed me to.” 

His sharp blue eyes meet hers over the lip of his glass in a shrewd look. “So he ended up with…” He pauses, trying to recall the name to his memory. “Tits,” he shrugs, when he comes up blank. 

“Orihime,” Umi supplies, rolling her eyes. 

“Orihime. She used her healing powers to give me back my arm in Hueco Mundo.” He inclines his head to the side, studying her. “But you have healing powers, too… right? You’d heal him whenever he’d come back here.” 

“My powers can only heal physical damage,” Umi explains. “And even then, they’re limited in what they can do.” She shakes her head, her gaze pointed somewhere on the wall in front of her. “Orihime can actually reverse the damage done. Her Shun Shun Rikka can manipulate time and space and whatever the hell else to make a person’s body go back to the way it was before whatever happened to hurt it. Beyond that,” she continues, irritated at that old familiar bitterness creeping into her voice again, “she can heal emotional wounds. She’s good for trauma, for helping someone put the pieces of themselves back together again. And she and Ichigo had a history long before I ever met him.” She snorts. “I could never compete with that.” 

“And you wanted to?” Grimmjow is leaning forward again, genuine confusion on his pretty face. 

“Seems like you have a lot to learn about human women,” she says, her voice quiet in the still semi-darkness. 

“What for? Got no use for them.” He grins and shifts again, leaning back against the wall once more. 

“And yet, you keep turning up like a bad penny, wanting me to help you find Ichigo,” Umi points out. “At my job, and now at my house.” She takes another swig of the alcohol in her glass, relishing the burn of it as it makes its way down. “So why show up looking for Ichigo now, after all this time?”

“Why the sudden interest?” 

Umi shrugs. “You’ve been asking me all sorts of questions. It’s only fair you let me do the same.”

“It’s like I told you before. We have unfinished business,” Grimmjow answers, his tone easy. “He owes me a fight to the death.”

Umi leans against her headboard and crosses her legs, using the silence to study him. “So you came here to kill him,” she says after a while. 

This makes him chuckle. “Not if he kills me first.”

“All the more reason for me not to tell you where he is,” Umi remarks. 

“In fairness to me,” he starts, “he and I have fought to the death at least a dozen times before. No one ever really dies, obviously. Besides that, you do know where he is, and you won’t tell me. Why?” He shakes his head, that derisive chuckle escaping him once more. “From what you say, he jilted you. Why protect him after that? You don’t owe him anything.” 

“Ichigo has a family now,” she tells him. “People he’s responsible for protecting. He’s not as reckless as he used to be.” 

Her words seem to take him by surprise. “Didn’t think he was the type to settle down,” he laughs. 

Umi shrugs. “Guess he just needed the right person to bring that out in him.” 

“You sound bitter about that.” 

She doesn’t answer him. They sit that way for a few minutes, not speaking. It’s Umi who finally breaks the silence. “You and Ichigo have a history,” she starts, her voice sounding too loud in the quiet stillness of the room. “He told you about me, but he never told me about you.” She pauses. “Why do you think that is?”

Grimmjow considers the question, setting his empty glass on the desk beside him. Umi holds the bottle out to him, and he takes it to give himself a refill before passing it back to her. “The last time we fought, he almost really did kill me.” He pauses. “He went back to the living world, and I never saw him after that. I guess maybe he never planned on us crossing paths again, so he figured it wasn’t worth telling you about.”

“Sounds about right,” Umi concedes quietly. “He always did have a problem with keeping everything to himself. Not wanting to get the people in his life involved in his messes.” She looks up at him. “I won’t tell you where he is,” she starts. “If the two of you have that kind of history, maybe you should stop suppressing your Reiatsu and let him find you.”

“How do you know I’m suppressing it?”

Umi sighs, pushing herself off of the bed and walking the bottle of brandy back over to the cabinet in the corner. His eyes are on her again. The weight of his gaze feels almost like a physical caress, and Umi tries to ignore the warmth spreading over her body because of it. “That’s a stupid question, and you don’t strike me as a stupid guy. You don’t need me to answer that.” She turns to look at him. “I’d like to go to bed now, if you’d be so kind as to get the fuck out of my house.” 

Grimmjow laughs. “If you say so.” He stands, shoving his hands in his pockets and flashing her a grin. “See you around.” 

There is a whooshing sound, accompanied by the feel of wind on her face. When the air clears, Grimmjow is gone. 

*******

“Umi?” The surprise in his hushed voice is clear, and even though she can’t see his face, she’s sure he must be confused. She doesn’t blame him; it’s four in the morning and they haven’t spoken in years. “Umi, is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” she tells him. “I know I said I wouldn’t call you, but there’s something I thought you should know.”

Ichigo sighs. “Umi, I never said you couldn’t call--”

“Someone’s looking for you,” she interrupts. She doesn’t want to risk hearing what he might have to say about their past. Even after all these years, she doesn’t think she could handle it. “An Arrancar named Grimmjow. He came to my job and then my house looking for you.”

There is a sharp intake of breath on his end, followed by a few seconds of silence. “Umi,” he starts slowly, “did you just say what I think you said?”

“Former Sexta Espada. Grimmjow Jaegerjacquez came looking for you,” she repeats. 

“He came to you?”

She nods, then realizes he can’t see the gesture. “Yeah,” she confirms. “He’s been showing up at my bar for a few days now. Last night he told me he was looking for you and he wanted me to tell him where you were. I didn’t,” she adds quickly. “I would never compromise your--”

_ “Umi.” _ It’s his turn to cut her off. “He’s been at your bar, and at your house? You mean to tell me he knows where you live?” 

“He just showed up,” she tells him. “Said my spiritual pressure was like a lighthouse.” She hesitates. “He… I think he thought we were still together.” It makes her uncomfortable to say it. 

“Oh.” Ichigo’s voice goes soft. “I’m sorry. Umi…”

“It’s fine, Ichigo. I can take care of him. I won’t tell him where you are.” She is starting to regret this phone call, and would like to end it as soon as possible. “I shouldn’t have told you. It’s nothing to worry about.”

She can almost see him in her mind’s eye, adamantly shaking his head. “No, Umi. I don’t want you dealing with this guy,” he tells her. “You tell me when he shows up again, and I’ll come.”

“Ichigo…” She hates how fragile her voice sounds; she hates how her discomfort makes it hard to speak, hard to convey the confidence she wants to convey with the words she’s saying. “I know you’ve been cloaking your Reiatsu for a long time now because you don’t want any trouble. That’s why I haven’t told him where you are.” 

“Tell me when he shows up again,” he repeats, his tone brooking no room for argument. “And I’ll come.”

She hesitates. 

“I’m not asking, Umi.” 

“Ichigo,” She exhales, her intention to fight him on this a little longer. But the now-familiar whoosh of air behind her stops whatever words she’d been planning to say. 

“Sounds like you’ve found Kurosaki for me.” That deep, gravelly voice is in her ear, his body flush against her back. She feels the hard planes of muscle pressed against her, his hips on the soft swell of her backside. His proximity drags an involuntary shudder out of her. “Kurosaki, is that you?” He tosses the words over her shoulder. 

“Could you be any more rude?” She snaps, turning slightly and jamming her elbow into his ribs to put some space between them. “Ichigo, don’t---” She stops short when she realizes that the call has disconnected. “Son of a  _ bitch, _ ” she hisses at the man in her space. “The hell is wrong with you?”

He’s grinning at her in that devil-may-care way he has. “Didn’t take you long at all, did it? Seems like I understand the human woman better than you gave me credit for… hm?”

“You were just waiting for me to call him,” she concludes, anger bubbling out of her voice. “Bastard.”

He shrugs. “Humans are so goddamned predictable,” he chuckles. “I knew you’d eventually break and call him to tell him what was going on. And I knew the second you told him and I showed up again, he’d come running over here to rescue you.” 

“If you think Ichigo cares that much about me, you’re wrong.” Her gaze is defiant.

“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You seriously think you could take me on?"
> 
> "Not to the death," Umi interjects, waving her hand. "I enjoy my life far too much to end it on something stupid like this." 
> 
> "Tch." The sound of his laughter fills her room. "Just like I thought. You coward."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter!

“Why do you want to fight him so badly?” It’s not what she’d expected herself to ask, but the words are out of her mouth before she can stop them. 

It seems she’s not the only one surprised. Grimmjow stares at her. “You really wanna know?”

“Yeah,” she laughs, in spite of herself. “I really do.”

He hoists himself up on her desk, leaning his back against the wall. “He’s one of only a few that can really challenge me,” he explains simply. “My fights with him were never boring.”

“If all you’re looking for is a fight,” Umi starts, “you could get that from me, you know.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” he grins. 

“I’m mildly offended that you think I’m joking,” she huffs, putting her hands on her hips. 

“Hm,” he smirks. “Well, I can think of a few dozen things I’d like to do with you,” he starts, his eyes roving up and down her figure lazily. “But fighting ain’t one of them.” 

“Wow.” Umi rolls her eyes. “Subtlety just really isn’t your thing, huh?”

“So you’re just gonna pretend you haven’t been eyeing me down, too?” The question is accompanied by a knowing look, and it makes Umi flush. 

“I can appreciate an attractive man,” she mumbles defensively.

Grimmjow considers her, his face going serious again. “I don’t doubt you can defend yourself, and maybe hold your own in a fight,” he tells her. “But if you’re talking about an all-out brawl like the ones I have with Kurosaki, you’re out of your depth.” 

“But I wouldn’t know for sure unless I tried… right?” Umi knows the likelihood of her being able to best this Arrancar in a fight is very,  _ very  _ low. She can’t help herself, though; it’s been a long time since she’s sparred with anyone, and she wants to see how her skills stack up against someone Ichigo has fought on more than one occasion. 

“You seriously think you could take me on?”

“Not to the death,” Umi interjects, waving her hand. “I enjoy my life far too much to end it on something stupid like this.”

“Tch.” The sound of his laughter fills her room. “Just like I thought. You coward.” 

“So having something to live for makes me a coward?” She smirks. “You really do have a lot to learn about humans.” 

He’s essentially still eyefucking her when she feels another rush of air around her. This rush of air is charged with emotion - anger, she realizes; the spiritual pressure around her now is charged with anger - and Umi barely has time to register that he’s arrived before she’s surrounded by his presence. 

_ Ichigo.  _

It’s been three years, but the imprint is the same. The scent of bergamot still clings to his skin, and she can’t stop herself from breathing it in deeply. It reminds Umi of days spent in the clinic with him, watching Isshin teach him how to set a broken bone or sew stitches into the tender skin of a toddler’s forehead. She’d been surprised to see how gentle Ichigo could be with his hands - it always seemed to be in direct contrast to the way he used those hands when he wielded Zangetsu. 

His hands are gentle now, even as his Reiatsu swirls around him angrily. He appears in front of Umi, the way he has in so many of the dreams she’s had of him since he left her. Those hands that have wrapped a child’s sprained ankle just as deftly as they have slain hollows rest on her shoulders, and he leans down to meet her gaze with brown eyes that are softened by concern. 

“Are you alright, Umi?” 

She gathers the shattered pieces of her heart and cradles them close to her. At the sound of his voice, all she can manage is a nod. She’s afraid that if she tries to speak, the rest of her will shatter, too.

_ How can he still affect me this way?  _ She wonders it almost absently. Umi feels a little like she’s been knocked over the head with the way her blood is pounding in her veins; the emotional response she is having to Ichigo’s presence is accompanied by a very physical one… as though some force in her body is craving his Reiatsu, going active after a long period of dormancy and calling out to his spiritual pressure. 

Grimmjow sees the exchange, his eyes on Umi. He feels Ichigo’s spiritual pressure and his anger just as keenly as she does, but Grimmjow’s focus is not on the man he’s been looking for. He’s looking at Umi, and watching her reaction to Ichigo’s presence. 

He finds it fascinating, the way her body language changes when Kurosaki enters the room. She relaxes, then immediately tenses up again as though she’s reluctant to let Ichigo see her with her guard down. She looks to be on the verge of tears, half a dozen emotions flitting across her face in the span of just a few seconds. 

Relief.

Sadness.

Yearning.

Lust.

Love.

Grimmjow almost feels sorry for her. 

Ichigo turns to face him, his brown eyes no longer soft with concern. “You were looking for me.” 

“Yeah, I was,” Grimmjow nods. “You saved me the trouble of having to find you myself.” He pushes himself off of the wall he’d been leaning against, closing the distance between himself and Ichigo in just a few steps. “So you’re a family man now,” he goes on, that shit-eating grin back on his face. “I feel a little slighted that I didn’t get an invitation to the wedding.” 

Umi’s heart sinks to her toes when Ichigo spares a backward glance at her. He has to know that Grimmjow learned that bit of information from her, and she wonders if Ichigo resents her for telling the Espada something so personal about him. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, but she doesn’t think either man can hear her. 

“So what about it?” Ichigo has turned back to Grimmjow, addressing him in a steely voice. 

Grimmjow shrugs. “Does that mean you won’t fight me anymore?” 

Incredulously, Ichigo stares at the Espada. “Is that what you came here for?” He asks after a moment, obvious confusion in his tone. 

“Why else would I come here?” Grimmjow laughs. “I haven’t had a worthy opponent in a while. Thought I’d look you up so we could go at it like we did in the good old days. Don’t forget,” he adds with a smirk, “you owe me a fight to the death.” 

“Sorry.” Ichigo shakes his head. “If that’s what you came looking for, then I’ll have to disappoint you.” 

Grimmjow considers his words thoughtfully. “Nevermind then,” he says nonchalantly. He peers around Ichigo, his sharp blue eyes landing on Umi. “Guess I’ll take you up on your offer then, skull-face.” 

She’s barely opened her mouth to speak before Ichigo whirls around to face her. “What offer?” He hurls the question at her like a verbal bullet, his brown eyes narrowed. 

“To fight him,” Umi answers, her eyes darting to Grimmjow. He’s wearing a self-satisfied smirk. “In your stead.”

“Are you out of your  _ fucking _ mind?” Ichigo explodes. “Do you know what he is?”

His concern twists something inside of her, hard. It pulls at her consciousness and makes her feel foolish for wanting it to mean something.  _ You’re pathetic,  _ the little voice inside of her head screams.  _ Standing here licking the crumbs of his concern off of the floor like a forgotten mutt, when you know good and damn well he’ll go back to the woman sleeping in his bed. Back to his wife, back to the mother of his child.  _

_ Back to the woman he loves.  _

She speaks, if for nothing else but to drown out that voice. “I know what he is,” she answers quietly, squaring her shoulders and calling on all of her strength to meet those brown eyes. “And he knows what I am. He knows that there will be no fighting to the death.” She pauses. “All he needs is a sparring partner,” she adds. “And if I’m being honest with myself, it would be nice for me to hone my rusty skills, too.” 

“I won’t allow it.” 

She stares up at him. His eyes are hard, his face set and his tone of voice serious. 

Before she can answer, Grimmjow speaks up. “Hmm,” the Arrancar muses, his finger on his chin. “I don’t think you can do that, Kurosaki.” 

Ichigo whirls on him. “The hell---”

“Well, I remember learning that you were married, but it doesn’t seem like skull-face here is the one you’re married to.” Grimmjow starts. “And that makes her a free woman… able to do as she pleases whenever she pleases with whomever she pleases. As such, you can’t forbid her to do anything.”

Umi can feel the spike in Ichigo’s spiritual pressure. She feels the particles of his Reiatsu gathering in the air around her, swirling wildly in a reflection of his mood. He looks down at her, his face reddening. “Umi… if this is to get back at me---”

“Don’t you  _ dare _ ,” she cuts him off, hurt and embarrassed at his suggestion. “It… is not your job to protect me anymore. I can do that perfectly well myself. And Grimmjow is right,” she adds after a half-second. “What I get into doesn’t have to concern you anymore. You’re free of me, and everything that comes with that.” 

Her words have very clearly taken him aback; the expression on his face has become unreadable as he stares down at her. He drops his hands from her shoulders as though she has burned him and backs away a few feet. “You’re right,” he says finally, his voice quiet. “We’re not together anymore, and you’re free to do as you please. But as your friend, I think I have a right to want to make sure you’re safe.”

“My friend,” she repeats, the words almost getting snagged on the lump in her throat. She turns her back on him, walking over to the cabinet in her room and filling her glass with brandy. “Thank you for coming, Ichigo,” she says, her back still turned to him. “You know how to let yourself out.” 

Ichigo knows it’s as much of a dismissal as any; he knows that once Umi has made up her mind to do something, there’s no changing it unless she wants to. He glares at Grimmjow. “I swear, if you hurt her---”

“Wouldn’t dare,” Grimmjow interjects with a shrug. “I’m not the sort of man who would damage his own toys. Besides, didn’t you hear her? She’s not yours to protect, and not yours to worry about. What happens from this point on is between me and her.” He flashes Ichigo a grin. “Me and her, we’re gonna have a lot of fun playing together.”

*******

For a long time after Ichigo has gone, her bedroom is quiet. Umi has carried the bottle of brandy and the glass over to her bed, pointedly ignoring the blue-haired Espada parked on the edge of her desk as she proceeds to slowly get wasted. She knows it’s a bad idea - getting shitfaced in the company of a supernatural being who may or may not have a sadistic streak and who is perfectly capable of doing her harm in more ways than one - but she can’t help herself. She is drinking to numb the pain in her heart.

So far, she has been unsuccessful. 

This time, it’s Grimmjow who breaks the silence between them. “Hey. Shouldn’t you ease up a bit?” 

“The fuck do you care?” 

“I don’t,” he assures her. “But you’re gonna have a bitch kitty of a hangover later if you keep it up.”

“I repeat,” Umi says, enunciating each word clearly, “the fuck. Do you care.”

He shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He pauses, then speaks again. “Don’t see why you got yourself all twisted up over Kurosaki in the first place.”

She stares at him over the lip of her glass. “You wouldn’t,” she snarls, “because you care about nothing and nobody. Except maybe yourself,” she adds, “but I doubt you even care about yourself if you go around challenging people to fight you to the death.”

He chuckles. “You’re surprisingly lucid for a drunk woman.”

“I’m not drunk,” she rebuts. 

“You’re getting there.” 

“Not fast enough,” she snorts. “Tell me, Jimmygrow Juggernaut. Can an Espada get drunk?”

He raises an eyebrow at her. “Grimmjow. Jaegerjaquez.” 

“I know what your name is. It’s a whole ass mouthful.” 

“I’ll give you a mouthful.”

“I bet you would,” Umi mumbles, raising her glass to him in mock toast and looking him up and down appraisingly. “All you men with insane spiritual pressure have big dicks to go with it. It’s a rule at this point, right? Always wanted to know what kinda tree trunk the famous Zaraki Kenpachi was swinging between his legs.” She takes another healthy swig of her drink. “So can you or can’t you?”

“Can I what?” This time, both eyebrows go up.

She heaves an exasperated, tipsy sigh. “Get drunk.” 

“Of course I can,” he tells her. “Especially in this gigai.” 

“Then why don’t you join me?” She motions to the empty glass on the desk. “Join me in wallowing in my misery and self-pity.” 

He studies her for a moment, his head cocked to the side. “You realize what a dangerous proposal that is, right?” 

Umi stares back at him. “You’re a dangerous person,” she remarks with a sage nod. “But if you wanted to kill me,” she goes on, “you would have done it in the bar.”

It’s a valid point, but Grimmjow doesn’t give her the satisfaction of telling her so. 

“Besides,” Umi continues, “you and I are supposed to fight. It’s not a fair fight if you murder me while I’m drunk, is it?” She squints at him. “I bet you have some kind of twisted code of honor, don’t you?”

“Fuck, you’re mouthy,” he mutters, snatching the bottle of brandy out of her hand and filling his glass. “It’s no wonder Kurosaki left you for the sheep with the big tits. Bet she doesn’t talk half as much as you do.” 

“That was mean, you bone-faced, blue-eyed bastard,” Umi asserts. “Mean to me and mean to her.” 

“Sorry,” he says, sounding anything but remorseful. 

“I get it.” She stares at him. “You think I’m pathetic, hm?” 

“What I think,” he starts with a grin, “is that I was right about your face. You can’t hide anything. In the span of about two seconds, I learned just by looking at you that you still would very much like to be railed by Kurosaki at his leisure.”

Umi sighs and leans her head back against the headboard. “Well. You’re not wrong about that.”

He shrugs, settling himself at the other end of her bed and leaning his back against the high footboard. At Umi’s pointed look, he holds up a hand. “The desk is hard on my gigai’s ass,” he offers by way of explanation.

“Come any closer and I’ll castrate your gigai,” she warns him. “I’m not too drunk to know my way around a blunt knife.”

Her threat seems to amuse him, but he doesn’t attempt to move any closer. 

“Ichigo was my first love,” she starts softly, unprompted. Her eyes are looking towards the window, but her gaze is facing inward. “I met him shortly after he came back from Soul Society the first time, when he rescued Kuchiki Rukia. I’d twisted my ankle running with some friends, of all things, and we were near the Kurosaki clinic at the time. Ichigo’s dad checked my foot to make sure nothing was sprained or broken,” she explains, “but Ichigo was the one who walked me home. We became fast friends after that, and we stayed friends for a very long time before we ended up together… but for me, it was love at first sight. 

“I knew right away that there was something different about him,” she continues. “I felt his spiritual pressure almost like it was a tangible thing, something I could reach out and touch.” She pauses thoughtfully. “Looking back on it now, I wonder if maybe it was because he’d acquired a new kind of power while he was in Soul Society, and it was strong enough to imprint on me, even after he came back to the living world.”

“Could be,” Grimmjow shrugs. “Or maybe you just fell victim to the Dumbass Human Disease.” 

“Do you ever get tired of being an asshole?” The words come out as an exasperated sigh. 

He grins at her. “If I do, you’ll be the first one to know it.” 

She scrubs a hand over her face, suddenly exhausted. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “You don’t give a shit about any of this anyway.” She sets the bottle of brandy and the glass on her nightstand, then reaches up to shut off the light. “You can let yourself out,” she mumbles into her pillow, turning away from him and pulling the covers up over her head. “Come find me in the morning when you’re ready to fight.”

Grimmjow looks at her prone form and thinks to himself that it will be a miracle if she wakes up in the morning at all, let alone in any condition to fight. He sets his empty glass on the nightstand beside hers, sparing her one last glance before disappearing in a soft whoosh of air. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I should've placed bets on you not being up in the morning," Grimmjow says, his mouth wide in a cocky grin. "Would've been my lucky day."
> 
> Umi doesn't have the strength to yell, and even if she did, it would probably only split her head even wider open and make her more nauseous. All she can do is sigh resignedly. "How long have you been waiting here?"

As expected, Umi wakes with a splitting headache and the taste of cotton in her mouth. 

The sunlight streaming through the blinds of her room tells her that she’s slept in much later than she intended to. The clock on the nightstand confirms this, proudly boasting its time as a quarter past two in the afternoon. 

“Shit,” she mutters, burying her face in the pillow. “So last night wasn’t just a nightmare.” 

Gingerly, she sits up, bracing her back against the headboard and willing the room to stop spinning. Umi can’t remember the last time she’s gotten this drunk; as someone who spends most of her nights watching other people get horribly plastered, she generally makes it a point not to overindulge in alcohol. 

Her heart lurches when her memory catches up to her and she recalls the events from the previous night. She takes a few deep breaths to steady herself, closing her eyes and groping in the rumpled bedclothes in an attempt to locate her phone. 

When she finds it, she discovers that the battery is dead. It takes her another five minutes to realize that the phone’s charging cord has fallen between the side of her bed and the nightstand - it’s a close call when she bends over to get it - and another two minutes to properly line the charging cord up with the port at the bottom of her phone. It isn’t until she’s turned the device back on that an amused chuckle from the far corner of her bedroom catches her attention. 

“I should’ve placed bets on you not being up in the morning,” Grimmjow says, his mouth wide in a cocky grin. “Would’ve been my lucky day.”

Umi doesn’t have the strength to yell, and even if she did, it would probably only split her head even wider open and make her more nauseous. All she can do is sigh resignedly. “How long have you been waiting here?” 

“Waiting?” Grimmjow shakes his head. “I told you, your spiritual pressure is like a lighthouse. I’ve gotten so attuned to it now that I can tell when it’s dormant. When you woke up, it spiked like a seismic wave. That’s when I decided to mosey on over here and see how fucked you were.”

“That’s… slightly unsettling,” she manages. “I probably should be more creeped out by it, but I honestly can’t find the energy to care that much.”

He shrugs. “Not my fault you give off Reiatsu like a homing device. It’s a wonder you aren’t constantly attacked by hollows.”

She knows why hollows don’t attack her. Ichigo may be a husband and a father who hides his spiritual pressure when he needs to, but he is still very much a Shinigami, and Umi knows that he is part of the reason why the town of Karakura is safe for her and people like her to live in.

Her phone is buzzing incessantly; Umi assumes it’s catching up with alerts she missed while it was turned off. Curiously, she glances down at the display. 

**_Kurosaki Ichigo_ **

**_17 Missed Calls_ **

Her eyes widen, and she brings the tiny screen closer to her face, blinking rapidly to make sure she isn’t seeing things. “Fuck,” she mumbles, rubbing her eyes with the back of her fist. “Why can’t he just disappear from my life like he did before?” _You opened this can of worms,_ her inner voice reminds her. _Ichigo was minding his business, living his perfect little life, when you decided to call him like a damsel in distress._

“No,” she murmurs. “That wasn’t what I---” The words are already out of her mouth before she remembers that she’s not alone in the room. She looks up at Grimmjow. He’s staring back at her. 

“So you _do_ make it a habit to talk to yourself,” he chuckles. “You need more friends, skull-face.” 

“If all you have to keep yourself occupied is hanging around my bedroom like a creep, then maybe you need more friends, too,” Umi snaps back. 

“All my friends are either dead or married with families and won’t fight me anymore,” Grimmjow mock-pouts. “Which is why I’m here - you promised me you’d give me a challenge.” He looks her up and down. “So far all you’ve given me is sob stories.” 

“Fuck you,” she spits. 

“Maybe after you bathe,” he shoots back. “I can smell the liquor on you from way over here.” 

She hurls her pillow at him. Unsurprisingly, it misses him by a mile, and the energy it takes to throw it does nothing but make Umi more nauseous. She hurries in the direction of her bathroom, fighting gravity’s attempts to bodyslam her to the floor and making it to the toilet just in time to void the contents of her stomach in a very noisy, very messy way. 

Grimmjow turns away from her. “I’ll come back later,” he tosses over his shoulder, “when you’ve made yourself into a decent human being again.”

*******

Umi vomits twice more before her stomach finally settles down. She takes her time in the shower, letting the steam relax her muscles and ease the tension out of her entire body. She knows she should eat something, but her stomach roils uneasily at the thought of solid food. _A little broth and some toast should be okay,_ she thinks to herself as she towel-dries her hair. 

She’s wrapped in her robe and settled down on the sofa with the broth, toast, and a cup of strong tea when her phone begins buzzing again. She glances over at it. Sighing, she briefly debates pressing the ignore button, but she knows that if she does that he’ll only call again and again, until she picks up the phone. 

Sliding her thumb across the screen to answer the call, she puts the phone up to her ear. “Hello.”

“Umi, where’ve you been?” There’s concern in his voice again, and it rips a fresh hole into her heart. 

“Sorry,” she murmurs. “My phone was dead, and I slept in.”

The silence on the other end of the line, she knows, is Ichigo processing her words and trying to determine if what she’s said is the truth. “Where’s Grimmjow?”

“I don’t know.”

“Umi---”

“Ichigo, _please.”_ The words spill out of her, accompanied by tears welling up in her eyes. _This is so cliche… Just how pathetic can one woman be?_ “I’m… I’m fine, okay? I told you last night that I’m fine, and nothing has changed.” 

“Am I not allowed to be worried about you anymore, Umi? Have I been banned from caring about you?”

“Don’t.” She almost chokes on the word. “Please don’t.” 

“Why?”

 _Pick a reason,_ she thinks. _The fact that you broke my heart and I haven’t been able to get over you. The fact that I can still hear your voice when my apartment is quiet, that I still dream about you, and I still cry over you. The fact that no one else’s body seems to fit in mine the way yours did, or that I can’t forget the scent and the taste and the feel of your skin. The fact that I still love you, even after all this time has passed and you’ve moved on with your life. Pick one, Ichigo… but all of them would be the answer to your why._

This is not a conversation Umi wants to have over the phone. It’s not a conversation she wants to have at all, if she’s being perfectly honest with herself… but especially not like this, when her feelings about seeing him after so long away from him are still very raw, and she’s still hungover and only half in her right mind. She is too vulnerable, too emotionally fragile, and - she remembers bitterly - still too very much in love with this man. 

“Ichigo,” she sighs. “You know why.” She hesitates, but only for a moment, and only because she hears the familiar sound of air rushing into the space behind her. “And if you really care about me, you won’t make me say it. You’ll trust me when I say that I’m fine, and you’ll forget that I ever made the mistake of calling you again after all this time.”

“Umi, you can’t ask me to do that.” There’s frustration in his voice. “You don’t know Grimmjow like I do. He doesn’t know what the meaning of the word ‘restraint’ is. Whatever you’re doing with him, he won’t be kind or gentle about it. He’s violent, and he’s crazy, and if you stick around him long enough, you’re gonna get hurt.” 

“Well then,” Umi sighs. “Guess it’s a good thing he’s not around anymore, huh?”

Her words give him pause. “Not around, as in…?”

“He’s gone,” she hedges. “He left last night.” 

“And he hasn’t been back since?” There’s obvious doubt in Ichigo’s voice. 

“Well, I was sleeping until a quarter past two,” she tells him. “But he isn’t here now, so I take that to mean he got tired of waiting for me to wake up and fight him, and he’s gone on to greener pastures.” 

He sighs. “Will you promise me that if he shows up again, you’ll tell me?” 

“I promise.” She swipes at her wet eyes with the back of her hand. “Look, I’ve got to go. Don’t worry about me, okay?” Before he can answer, she disconnects the call. 

“She’s got a dirty mouth,” Grimmjow says in a singsong voice, practically purring in her ear from his place behind the sofa. “And she tells the most gorgeous lies with it.” 

Umi ignores him, choosing instead to focus on feeding herself. Her grateful stomach settles at the mild, comforting food, and she starts to feel vaguely human again. Grimmjow joins her on the sofa, sitting at the opposite end and watching her with his bright, catlike eyes. 

“Just like a bad penny,” she mumbles, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. 

“You said you’d play with me,” he grins. “Did you think I would forget?” 

“I knew very well that you wouldn’t.”

“Still want to play?” He asks, eyebrows raised. “Even though I don’t know the meaning of the word restraint, and even though I’m violent and crazy?” He shifts on the sofa, invading her space. “Even though I’m bound to hurt you?”

“I’m not afraid of a little bit of pain,” Umi shrugs. 

“Won’t just be a little bit, skull-face,” he grins. “I’m not gonna kill you, but I’m gonna fuck you up so bad you might wish I would.” He winks at her. “I think you’ll like it, though… the pain is guaranteed to take your mind off Kurosaki. It’s a win-win, you see.” 

“What you’re saying is that you’ll play the sadist to my masochist,” Umi chuckles darkly.

Grimmjow licks his lips. “I’m not picky… I’ll play the masochist to your sadist if you want me to.” 

Something about the way he says it makes Umi’s pulse jump. “Are we still talking about fighting?” 

“Like I said, I’m not picky.”

She isn’t sure what to make of that. “I hope you’re happy,” she says after a moment. 

He stares at her. “If you have something to say to me, just say it. I don’t know how to read minds and I’m not interested in learning.”

Umi sighs, wondering how unfair it is to lay all the blame squarely at his feet. “If you hadn’t showed up at my place,” she starts, trying to keep her tone neutral, “I would have gone on living life blissfully ignorant of the way it feels to open up old wounds.” 

She expects him to be angry at her straightforward accusation and braces herself for potentially volatile backlash. To her surprise, he seems to be amused. “Yeah, well,” he laughs, “I’ve had enough old wounds to know the only reason they reopen is because they never healed right in the first place.” 

“Fuck,” she breathes, taken aback. “That was more poignant than I would have expected from an asshole like you.”

Grimmjow actually looks mildly wounded. “Assholes have feelings too, you know.”

It makes her laugh. “I guess they do,” she concedes. “I never would have guessed.”

He studies her, his face growing serious. “You really love him,” he concludes. 

“Is that so hard to believe?” She sighs warily. “Ichigo is a magnet - even you know that. He draws people to him wherever he goes, even if he’s not trying. Half those people end up falling in love with him, and the other half want to kill him. It’s why I can’t seem to get over him, and why you went through the trouble of coming all the way here for him.”

“I came here to fight him because I was bored,” he shrugs. “Your feelings and mine are two very different things.” He stands up. “That being said, I hope you got all that emotional shit out of your system now, because I’m ready to see if you can take me on.”

*******

Umi isn’t familiar with the place he takes her to. It’s underground - she knows that much - and it reminds her a little of the space beneath Urahara Kisuke’s shop where Ichigo would sometimes train with Abarai and Chad.

“We don’t have to hold back here,” Grimmjow says, as if in answer to a question Umi has asked. “It’s got a spiritual barrier around it that’s five layers thick, and whatever we destroy can be rebuilt in a matter of hours.” 

“I wonder what the rental fee is on this,” Umi jokes. 

“A few hundred souls.”

She looks at him sharply, but his facial expression gives nothing away. She decides to accept what he’s said as a deadpan joke and move on. “Alright then. So what are the rules?” 

“Rules?” One light blue eyebrow goes up. 

“Yes, _rules_ ,” Umi repeats emphatically. “To keep things fair and aboveboard.” She hesitates before adding, “And to make sure you don’t _actually_ end up killing me.”

Grimmjow chuckles. “There’s only one rule, skull-face.”

“And what’s that?”

“Listen to me and do what I say, and you might just learn something.”

She looks at him blankly, unable to form a coherent thought.

“What?” He inclines his head to the side, studying her. “You didn’t actually think I brought you here to fight me, did you?”

“That’s exactly why I thought you brought me here.”

He throws his head back and gives her a full-bodied laugh. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, when his laughter has died, “but as you are, you can’t beat me. You can’t even come close to beating me.”

“You don’t know that,” she snaps, trying to stifle her humiliation with anger. 

“I do know it,” Grimmjow tells her in a matter-of-fact tone. “And I’ll tell you why. Your spiritual pressure is unusually intense, but you’re under-utilizing it. Your fire incantations need work. From what I can see, you’re pretty strong for your build, but I doubt you’ve had much experience fighting off and freeing yourself from opponents that are bigger and stronger than you. Kurosaki tying you down and fucking you as roleplay doesn’t count,” he adds, when she opens her mouth to object. “Although I am curious to see how much of that kind of shit that he learned from me was implemented on you, if you ever feel like sharing.”

Her face flushes, and once again she’s left in speechless indignance. “Asshole---”

“You clearly have never been taught how to use Flash Step,” he interjects. “And there’s so much more you could be doing with your Reiatsu daggers.”

“How did you know about those?”

He shoots her a withering look, as if to say the question isn’t worth his time. “Maybe Kurosaki will come around and decide to fight me,” he goes on. “And maybe he won’t. Whether he does or not, I’m not gonna give myself the unfair advantage of fighting someone whose skill level isn’t even in the same orbit as mine. That’s something a coward would do, and I’ve never been a coward.”

Umi shakes her head, trying to connect the dots in her mind. “So you’re saying you brought me here… to teach me how to fight you… so I can fight you?”

“Now you’re awake.” He grins at her. “Tch. Did you really think I would let you take me on as you are now?” 

“I’m trying not to be offended,” Umi mutters, “but you are making that very difficult.” 

“Don’t be offended. Consider yourself lucky - you’re about to learn from the best.”

Well, she can’t argue with _that._ “You don’t strike me as a ‘look on the bright side’ kinda guy,” she starts slowly, “but I guess the prospect of knocking me around probably is a bright side for you, so…” She shrugs. “Okay.”

This makes him grin. “How high is your pain tolerance?”

“Pretty high,” Umi answers, her face coloring slightly. 

He chews over this for a moment. “There are ways of putting that to the test, and I plan to do it,” he muses thoughtfully. “So we’ll find out soon enough… and if it needs fixing, we’ll fix it.” He flashes her a grin. “So let’s get started, hm?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _What would Ichigo say if he knew?_ Her inner voice goads her. 
> 
> _He wouldn't care,_ Umi snaps back at it. _He took my word for it that Grimmjow was gone, and no matter how many times and in how many ways he says he still cares for me and worries about me, I will never have his love._

“Did you get a gym membership or something?” Hitoka’s question is accompanied by a squeeze of Umi’s bicep. “Not that you weren’t fit before, but you’re looking extra toned these days.”

Umi laughs. “Oh, if only you knew the daily workouts I’ve been getting.”

Hitoka’s eyes go wide. “Wait, you mean sex?”

“I wish,” Umi shakes her head. “No. I sort of got myself a personal trainer, that’s all.”

It isn’t exactly a lie, although if pressed, Umi would have to admit that her sessions with Grimmjow are far more intense and taxing than probably any personal trainer on the planet would put her through. She hadn’t been acutely aware of the effects on her body until Hitoka mentions it. Now that it’s been brought to her attention, she realizes her body has changed, and quite a bit. 

“Well whatever you’ve been training on, it’s working... so keep it up,” Hitoka laughs, squeezing her arm one more time before floating off to take care of a patron sitting at the end of the bar. 

Umi wonders if Hitoka would even remember Grimmjow. The sweet, flighty bartender under Umi’s employ has a notoriously short attention span, and Grimmjow hasn’t actually graced Umi’s bar with his presence since the night he told her that he was looking for Ichigo.

 _And why would he?_ Her inner voice pops up with a wry smile. _He knows exactly where to find you if he needs to… and has done so almost every day since then._

She doesn’t know where he goes or what he does when he’s not showing up at her apartment or training her. She’s never asked, and he’s never offered, and Umi gets the feeling it’s better that way. 

_What would Ichigo say if he knew?_ Her inner voice goads her. 

_It doesn't matter,_ Umi snaps back at it. _He took my word for it that Grimmjow was gone, and no matter how many times and in how many ways he says he still cares for me and worries about me, I will never have his love._

She has been training with Grimmjow for two months now, and every day that she trains with him, she surprises herself with just how little she knows about fighting in general and using her Reiatsu to fight in particular. He acknowledges her strength and her skills, but doesn’t hesitate to target her weaknesses in what can sometimes be very painful lessons. Ichigo hadn’t been lying when he’d told Umi there’s nothing kind or gentle about the Arrancar… and yet, Umi gets the feeling that the Grimmjow she has come to know is very different from the one Ichigo knew years ago. Less savage and vicious, more mellow perhaps. She wonders what accounts for the difference. 

*******

_“Fortunately for you, young lady,” Kurosaki-San smiles, “your ankle isn’t broken or even sprained. You simply twisted it the wrong way, straining your muscles a bit. You should be fine to put weight on it as long as you wrap it up tightly for a few days and don’t do anything strenuous.”_

_“Thank you,” Umi says gratefully. “How much do I owe you?”_

_The dark-haired doctor waves a hand dismissively. “This one is on the house,” he says. “Don’t worry about it - bandages are cheap.” He glances out the window. “But it’s dark now, and your friends are gone. Do you have a way home?”_

_“I’m actually not far from here, just a few blocks,” Umi explains. “I can walk it if I take my time.”_

_“Not alone, you won’t,” he rebuts firmly._

_“Oh, I’m fine, really---”_

_“ICHIGO!” The way he shouts the name towards the stairs startles Umi into silence._

_“WHAT!?” The answer comes from somewhere above them, accompanied by the sound of a door opening. “What the hell do you want, old man?”_

_“Need you to walk one of the patients home,” Kurosaki-San calls back. “So hurry up and get your ass down here.”_

_She can’t make out the words being mumbled, but the sound of the door slamming is very clear. A few seconds later, thunderous footsteps bring into her presence a boy with hair the brightest shade of orange that she’s ever seen. And then she feels it: spiritual pressure so strong it almost knocks the wind out of her._

_“Kurosaki-San,” she manages, even though it feels like she’s suffocating under the weight of this boy’s presence. “Really, I’m fine to walk alone---”_

_“It’s no problem, so let’s go,” the orange-haired boy - Ichigo, she remembers his name - says to her. The scowl on his face disappears, replaced by a friendly and disarming smile. “I’m Ichigo. What’s your name?”_

_“Umi,” she answers. It’s incredible - the moment he smiles, his spiritual pressure shifts from something frightening into something that draws her in like metal shavings to a magnet. Her heart lurches in her chest when she looks up at him, his smile going straight to the blood in her veins like a shot of some dangerous drug._

_She wonders if this is what love at first sight feels like._

_“Umi… Like the ocean?” He raises an eyebrow. “That’s nice.” He holds out his arm for her to take. “I know you said you’re fine to walk by yourself,” he explains at her surprised look, “but it’s nice to have support every once in a while, right?”_

_“Yeah,” she says softly, her heart fluttering. “Yeah, it is. Thank you.”_

*******

“Love at first sight,” she scoffs quietly to the empty storage room as she shifts a box from one shelf to another. 

“Still talking to yourself, eh?”

Startled, she jumps, nearly dropping the box in her arms. She hadn’t felt him come in. “Don’t _do_ that!” She hisses, setting the box safely out of harm’s way and whirling to face him. 

“You should pay more attention to your surroundings,” Grimmjow smirks, closing the distance between them in just a few steps. “What if I’d been a murderer? Or a rapist coming to have my way with you?”

Umi rolls her eyes, even as she feels her breath hitch in her throat. Grimmjow is a study in what it means to have no regard for personal space; he has pinned her against the hard metal shelf at her back, his arms bracketing her body and resting on either side of her shoulders. “Human murderers and rapists don’t use Sonido to sneak around and catch their victims unawares,” she points out. 

“So call me having an unfair advantage,” he grins. “I could still have my way with you if I wanted.”

“Not in the storage room of my bar.” 

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “Where then?”

Umi pushes at one of his arms. It doesn’t budge. “You’re not in your gigai,” she concludes, startled. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugs, flashing her another grin. “Maybe so your underlings can come in here and see you having a conversation with an invisible man.”

“You absolute fucking walnut,” she laughs. “I have work to do. Get out of my way.”

He pretends to pout. “You tired of playing with me already?”

“Of course not,” she tells him sincerely, surprising herself with the words. “But like I told you, I have work to do. And I can’t afford to be distracted by an invisible Arrancar - no matter how hot he is.”

“You think I’m hot,” he chuckles. “Imagine that. Didn’t think anything could pry you off the thought of Kurosaki’s cock, but here we are.”

She glares at him. 

He shrugs nonchalantly, releasing her from the cage of his arms and stepping aside. “Am I wrong?”

Umi doesn’t bother to answer him. 

*******

“More,”Grimmjow calls out. “You’re just being lazy now.”

“I’m not,” Umi protests. “This is all I can feel.” 

“Because you’re not focused,” he admonishes her. “Have you already forgotten the first thing I taught you?”

“Of course not,” she sighs. “‘There is always Reishi around you, even in the living world,’” she recites, imitating Grimmjow’s deep, gravelly voice. “‘You only need to concentrate in order to bring that reishi to you and use it to your advantage.’”

“So _concentrate,”_ he chides her. “We’re out here in the middle of the fucking forest, where the Reishi is waiting like fruit on trees for you to take it and use it. So take it and use it.”

Stifling an exasperated sigh, Umi re-centers herself, clearing her mind and reaching out with her Reiatsu to find the spirit particles around her. _Breathe in, breathe out. Focus on the particles. Communicate with them. Don’t chase them; let them feel your energy and come to you of their own accord. When you do that, you build a bond of trust with them, and they will work better for you._ Fully focused, she feels the shift in atmosphere. The spirit particles come to her, each one as different in its composition as snowflakes are from one another. They gather around her, attaching themselves to her Reiatsu daggers and making them stronger. 

“Good,” she hears Grimmjow say, and his praise feels like warm summer sunshine. “Really good. A little slow, but it’s better you learn how to do it slow the right way than fast the wrong way.” 

Umi nods. “I can feel the difference,” she tells him. “I never would have imagined there was this much Reishi out here.”

“It’s everywhere,” he explains. “Especially in a place like this, where nature is practically undisturbed. You just have to know where to look for it and how to call it to you. The more you practice gathering it to you, the easier it’ll become, and the faster you’ll be able to do it. Then maybe one day you’ll actually be able to use those daggers in a fight,” he grins. 

“That’s exciting,” she admits, unable to help the way she beams at him. 

He’s looking at her strangely, a solemn expression on his face. 

“What? Is my enthusiasm overwhelming you?” She teases him. 

She expects him to tease her back, but his expression is still serious. “What’d you love so much about Kurosaki, hm?”

Umi’s mouth is all set to tell him off, to go up one side of him and down the other with all the colorful expletives in her verbal arsenal. But one look at the expression on his face, and she realizes that his question is a serious one. “Well that came out of nowhere,” she sighs, sinking down onto the grass beneath her and crossing her legs. 

Grimmjow shrugs, joining her in the grass. “You just seem to be really hung up on him.”

“That’s what happens when you don’t get closure,” Umi laughs sardonically. “You spend years rehashing everything and wondering what you did wrong.” 

“What makes you think you did something wrong?”

“He left,” she says pointedly, stating the obvious. 

“Yeah,” he agrees. “But that might’ve been more of a Kurosaki problem than a you problem, skull-face.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You humans make everything so fucking _complicated,_ ” he complains. “And you take everything so personally. So Kurosaki split. He went back to the woman he loved from the beginning. Don’t you think that has more to do with his feelings than it does with something you might or might not have done?” He shakes his head. “You said it yourself. He was always gonna love her, and there was probably nothing you could’ve done about that. Maybe you didn’t know it at the time, but you know it now. So there’s your closure.”

“It’s not that simple.” 

“Okay then,” he says, turning to face her. “Explain to me why it’s not that simple.”

“I… still love him very much,” she starts. “Even though it’s been years since we were together, and even though it’s obvious that he will never love me the way that I thought he did. It’s like… nothing else compares to him now.” The explanation isn’t nearly good enough and she knows it. _But how do I explain something I don’t even understand myself?_

He’s looking at her blankly. “Still don’t get it.”

Umi purses her lips pensively, trying to gather her thoughts. “I don’t know why I’m still so hung up on Ichigo,” she confesses quietly. “Don’t know why I still love him so much. He broke my heart. I should hate him. And you’ll probably scoff at me and call me stupid for what I’m about to say, but… it’s almost like I can’t get him out of my system. Like there’s some invisible connection between us that wasn’t severed properly when he left.” She looks over at him. “You and Ichigo are a lot alike,” she smiles. “It was the first thing I noticed when I started getting to know you.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “Can’t tell if that’s supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing.” 

“It’s a good thing,” she laughs. “You’re both deeper than you look at first glance. Really intense, a little bit scary. But once you get past that frightening exterior to the man beneath, you realize that all that intensity is just your strong feelings tangibly manifesting themselves. I don’t know what you were like before, when Ichigo first met you,” she goes on thoughtfully. “But it seems like you might be different in a lot of ways. Like… maybe you’ve changed.” 

He considers her words, his brow furrowed. “Won’t argue with that.” 

“So what will it take for me to get over a man I can never have, Grimmjow-Sensei?”

“The hell are you asking me for?” He grumbles. “If you want my advice, you just need a good fuck.”

“I’ve had a few of those since,” Umi mutters. “Trust me, it doesn’t work.”

He grins at her. “You haven’t had one of my good fucks. I guarantee that would change your mind - and your life,” he adds cockily. 

She can feel her face flush, and she’s happy for the cover of night. “You sure are confident.”

“Wouldn’t be so confident if I couldn’t back it up.”

“And to think,” she sighs, laying back in the grass and looking up at the stars. “I thought you were gonna kill me.”

“And to think… You thought you could take me on in a fight,” he murmurs, amusement in his voice. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t try?”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “I am. I like you much better as my Sensei.” 

*******

“Where do you go, when you leave here?” 

He stares at her over the steaming bowl of rice that’s halfway to his face. “You never cared before,” he says, lowering the bowl slightly and smirking at her. “Why the sudden interest?”

“Oh I’ve always been curious,” she admits. “But I didn’t think it likely you would tell me before.”

“Okay, so why ask now?”

“Because you’ve been generous with your words all night,” she shrugs. “Figured I could play the lottery one more time and maybe get some more honest answers out of you.”

“Smartass,” he mumbles, raising the bowl to his mouth and shoveling rice in. Once he’s lowered the bowl and has finished chewing, he speaks again. “I stay where we train, mostly,” he tells her. 

Umi’s eyes go wide. “You mean, outside? Or in that underground arena-type thing?”

“Either one. Whichever feels better at the time.” 

“Why don’t you just stay here?” The words are out of her mouth before she’s had a chance to clear them with her brain. _Shit, I can’t take them back now,_ she realizes, silently going into a mild panic. 

He’s watching her closely, amusement in his eyes. “You shouldn’t offer something you’re not really willing to give, you know.” 

“It’s not that,” she declares. “I just didn’t want you to think I was being, well… like, overly forward or something.” 

He laughs. “Since when have you ever given a shit what I think?” 

“You’re an asshole, but you’re an honest asshole, and I respect you.” Umi holds out her hand for his empty bowl. Wordlessly, he hands it to her, and she fills it with more rice. “Besides, you’re here every day anyway. And now that I actually know how to properly use my Reiatsu daggers, I feel confident that I can at least defend myself if you get unfriendly.”

Her words make him laugh even harder. “Nice try, but you’re still too slow. I could have you pinned before you even got the chance to summon them. Wouldn’t do that, though,” he adds, his face going serious. “Food that’s stolen doesn’t taste half as good as food that’s offered to me freely. Even assholes have codes of honor,” he adds with a wry smile.

“Then stop sleeping on the ground outside and start using the sofa,” Umi replies. “It’d also help assuage my guilt about getting training from you for free.” 

If he rolls his eyes any harder, Umi thinks, they’ll pop right out of his head. 

*******

For a long time after she has gone to sleep, Grimmjow stays awake, listening to her soft snores through the open bedroom door. She’d hustled him off of the sofa when they were done eating, and he’d watched in fascination as she removed the cushions and yanked a whole bed out of the thing - complete with a nice-looking mattress. She’d covered it with sheets and blankets and pillows, fussing with the setup until she thought it was perfect. 

He’s buried now in that mass of soft, lavender-scented fabric. The comfortable mattress beneath him is a hell of an improvement over the hard ground he’s been sleeping on, and he is grateful for the change. 

If he digs a little deeper and plays the honesty card with himself, he’ll admit that he is grateful for _her._ In truth, Grimmjow came to the living world looking for Ichigo because he was lonely. Ichigo is the closest thing he’s ever had to something resembling a real friend. 

Or at least, he was. 

Grimmjow wonders what Umi would say if she knew that she had more in common with him than she thinks. She strikes him as a very lonely person, and he’s sure that it’s due in part to the fact that Ichigo left her behind and she can’t seem to move on from that. He sympathizes with her, in a way - most of the people in his life have moved on and left him behind at one time or another. He understands the frustration of not being able to get past something like that. 

He likes her though, this woman. She isn’t afraid of him, even though she knows she should be. She is a strange dichotomy of tough and delicate, and it fascinates him to see all of those different facets of her manifesting themselves. She gives as good as she gets when he teases her, and she’s an attentive, fast learner when he’s training her. 

On top of all of that, she’s beautiful. Gods, she could do anything to him… anything at all, and he’d let her. He wants to - wants her to let him show her how to make him beg, to make him cry, to completely destroy him and put him back together again. He wants her to trust him to do the same to her, to let him break her in the best way possible. 

_Won’t happen,_ his inner voice pokes at him. _She’s only got eyes for Kurosaki. She’ll never look at you the way she looks at him, even if you waited a thousand years for it. And it’s just another thing he bested you at._

He grits his teeth and ignores the voice, shifting further into his cocoon of blankets. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A how-to guide for domesticating an Espada: Rice and high thread count sheets are essential.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Umi clamps her mouth shut, refusing to let even the slightest sound escape her. Grimmjow twists her arm harder. "I'll let you go if you scream for me in that pretty voice of yours," he chuckles, his breath warm on her ear. "But I would much rather you remember what I taught you about how to get out of a hold like this."

It takes Umi a grand total of ninety-eight days to learn that her pain threshold is not nearly as high as she thought it was. It’s getting better every day, thanks to the way her relentless trainer has been pushing her limits a little higher with each session.

Of course, she isn’t going to give Grimmjow the satisfaction of knowing that. Especially since the discovery is followed by the realization that she actually enjoys it when he tests the limits of her pain tolerance. Umi would be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about how he might find other ways to test her pain tolerance in a different, more intimate setting. 

And while it has lain dormant for a long time, the desire itself isn’t new to her; she can think back to similar desires in the days when she and Ichigo were still sharing a bed. She recalls how her pleasure was heightened whenever he would bite or spank her during sex, and how much more intensely she would come if he pinched her nipples or her clit instead of simply stroking them. 

“Had enough already?” Grimmjow calls from where he stands a few yards away from her, watching her like a hawk.

“You wish,” Umi pants, flexing the fingers of her right hand. She’s sure he’s come close to breaking - or at least spraining - a couple of those fingers, even though thus far in these most recent sessions, he has only used his enhanced speed and strength against her. He comes out of his gigai when they train as well, which makes him ten times stronger and faster.  _ I can see that I’ve improved drastically from when we first started, but I’ve still got a long way to go. If he’s this strong and he’s not even using his spiritual pressure or anything else he’s got in his arsenal,  _ she thinks,  _ then he was right - he really might have been able to kill me quickly if I’d tried fighting him as I was when we first met.  _ The thought frustrates her.  _ It was never like this when I trained on hand-to-hand combat with Ichigo,  _ she remembers.  _ But I guess he was holding back on me.  _

She feels that influx of air around her just before he appears behind her. She isn’t quick enough to react, and he’s got her sore hand twisted behind her back before she can step away from him. “Too. Fucking. Slow,” he whispers in her ear, trapping her arm between his body and hers. He wraps the fingers of his other hand around her throat, squeezing just tightly enough to make it difficult for her to breathe. “And this would be the third time you’ve died today.”

Umi clamps her mouth shut, refusing to let even the slightest sound escape her. Grimmjow twists her arm harder. “I’ll let you go if you scream for me in that pretty voice of yours,” he chuckles, his breath warm on her ear. “But I would much rather you remember what I taught you about how to get out of a hold like this.”

She struggles against him, but his grip is like a vice. “Remember that I’m not in my gigai,” he reminds her. “If you keep struggling like that, your shoulder is gonna pop right out of its socket. Calm down. You can’t think clearly if your mind is not calm.” 

“You’re one to talk,” Umi grinds out between her still-clenched teeth, stilling her body. “Everything you do is impulsive and the exact opposite of calm.”

“If you have time to throw insults at me that aren’t even true,” he points out, “you have time to calm yourself and figure out how to get out of this.”

She knows he’s right. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, calling back to her memory what he demonstrated for her in their first self-defense session. She follows the steps in her mind, mirroring them with her body until she’s able to escape that iron grip. When she’s freed herself, she turns to look at him. 

“You’re still way too slow,” he tells her with a frown. “You shouldn’t have had to think about it so hard - we’ve been over it enough times that getting out of that hold should’ve been like breathing for you. And if you hadn’t been distracted in the first place,” he scolds her, “I never would’ve been able to put you in that hold.” He peers at her closely. “What had your mind wandering, anyway?”

Umi’s face flushes, but she keeps her mouth shut. 

Unexpectedly, he doesn’t press the issue. 

“Heh,” he chuckles. “Alright, I’ll let you keep your little secrets. But the next time you let them distract you, I’m not gonna hold back.”

It’s Umi’s turn to frown. “That’s what you call ‘holding back’? Sometimes I think Ichigo was right about you, and you’re actually trying to kill me.”

“You wound me, skull-face. Yes, killing you might be the easiest way to get Kurosaki to come after me,” he says thoughtfully. “But contrary to what you might think, I’m not gonna do that.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t think you’d need a reason at this point in our time together, but if you have to have one… let’s just say playing with you is more fun than I thought it would be.” He looks at the way she’s flexing her fingers. “How about we give it a rest and pick back up again tomorrow?” 

The part of her that’s frustrated with herself for being much weaker than she thought she was - even after months of training with him - wants to protest. She wants to tell him that she’s still good to go another few rounds, that she can continue taking whatever he’s planning to dish out to her. But she’s tired, and she’s sore, and she’s overwhelmed with disappointment at her slow-moving progress. “Why are you doing this, Grimmjow? Why are you wasting time on training me when my progress is almost nonexistent?” 

“Your progress is nonexistent?” He raises his eyebrows. “That’s a pretty biased viewpoint, and not at all accurate.”

“Oh come on,” she scoffs. “You know it’s true.”

“Not everybody can be a prodigy like Kurosaki, you know,” he shrugs. “You’re progressing at a faster than normal rate, believe it or not.” 

“Still doesn’t answer my question,” Umi rebuts, even though she has to work hard to hide how pleased she is at his compliment. “Why are you doing this?”

“I told you,” he grins over his shoulder as he puts himself back into his gigai. “Boredom.”

“So I’m just a plaything to you?”

“Obviously.” He laughs. “But I wasn’t lying when I said I’m fond of you.”

“Ichigo wasn’t just a plaything for you?” Since she already knows the answer, it’s more of a statement than a question, but she raises her inflection at the end of it anyway.

Grimmjow pauses in his movement, studying her face for a moment. “Kurosaki was fun to play with,” he starts. “But he was also a serious opponent. He was capable of doing real damage to me with his power, so I couldn’t afford to see him as just a plaything. Does that make you mad?” 

“No,” she answers honestly. “But it makes me feel a little cheated. I used to spar with Ichigo,” she explains at his look of confusion, “and I guess I’m just realizing now that he was going really easy on me.”

Grimmjow chuckles. “Of course he was,” he snorts. “Why would he need to train you hard if he was just gonna to be there to protect you when something went down anyway?”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. 

He’s still looking at her. “Why’d you lie to him about me being gone?”

Umi shrugs, turning away from him. It catches her by surprise when he grabs her arm and turns her back to face him. “What?” 

“Why. Did you lie to him. About me being gone?” He asks again. He’s holding her still, his face just a few inches away from hers, pinning her under that sharp, bright blue gaze. 

“Because I don’t want him trying to protect me,” she answers. She tries to twist her arm free, but he holds her there with that iron grip of his. 

“Oh? Not because you love my company that much?”

Umi laughs a little. “Do you think your company is that lovable?” 

“Mm,” Grimmjow hums thoughtfully. “Yeah, I do think you love my company. Why else would you willingly keep coming back for more of this punishment every day?”

“We talked about this, remember?” She grins, pointing to herself. “Me, masochist. You, sadist.” 

“You, masochist. Me, sadomasochist,” he corrects her with a wink. “And I suppose that’s the reason you’ve backed yourself into a corner with me, hm? The reason you haven’t told Kurosaki about this? And about our living arrangement?”

“I told you,” she mumbles. “I don’t want him trying to protect me.” 

He raises an eyebrow at her. “Even if it means you risk me hurting you?” 

“Like I said before, I’m not afraid of a little pain,” she laughs, dropping her gaze to her still-sore fingers. “You of all people should have caught onto that by now.”

“You really mean that?” He pulls her closer - flush against him with not even a centimeter of space between them. “‘Cause I can think of about a million and one more ways to hurt you - the best kind of pain. Like this, for instance---” He takes her uninjured hand in his, raising it to his mouth and biting hard into the soft flesh between her wrist and her thumb. Umi barely stifles a moan, and it makes him chuckle. “Do you like that, Umi? You like it when I hurt you?”

“It… d-depends,” she breathes out, her voice ragged. 

He bites into her hand again, running his tongue over the bit of flesh between his teeth. Umi is squirming now, not to get out of his grip, but simply because she can’t help it - the sensation of his teeth on her skin is setting her entire body alight in a way that she hasn’t felt in a very long time. 

“Or, if you feel up to it, I can show you how to break me,” he goes on, his voice low and gravelly, his bright blue eyes meeting hers and holding her gaze. “I like pain too, you know. I’d let you hurt me if you wanted to… teach you what to do to make me yell.”

Her breath catches in her throat. She’s secretly grateful for the way he’s anchoring her waist with his arm. Her knees have gone weak, and she’s sure that if he wasn’t holding her up just so, she would collapse to the hard-packed earth beneath her. 

“Of course, I’m also perfectly capable of giving you pleasure without the pain,” he whispers, nuzzling her cheek. “If that’s what you want. I’m nothing if not versatile.”

“What… are you saying?” She asks the question haltingly, knowing the answer but needing to hear it anyway. 

“Can’t change my hair color,” he smirks, his tongue darting out to rasp over the teeth marks he’s left in her palm, “but if you close your eyes, you can pretend I’m him… right? Is that what you want, Umi?” 

Once again, his words are like a knife, slipping between the fragile bones of Umi’s ribcage to slice at her heart. She should be angry at those words, she knows. But she can’t seem to find the anger within her. “So that’s why you offered to train me,” she surmises.

He seems surprised at her statement. “I already told you why I’m training you,” he laughs. “And I’ll continue to train you even if you decide you don’t wanna take me and this gigai for a test ride. But,” he continues, looking at her knowingly, “I’m also not gonna stand here and pretend I didn’t see the way you looked at him when he came to you that night.” He shrugs. “I’m just offering you a better-than-average replacement for something you can’t have.”

His words hit their mark, pricking at her feelings a bit. Umi looks away from him. “And what do you get out of it if I say yes?” She asks softly, her eyes on the middle distance somewhere over his shoulder. 

He lets her hand go and grips her chin, bringing her gaze back to him and her mouth to his. She doesn’t protest when he presses his lips against hers, and the tiny whimper in the back of her throat when she opens her mouth to let his tongue in is her body’s second act of betrayal. Grimmjow is, in characteristic fashion, taking exactly what he wants from her, not giving her a chance to breathe as his tongue invades her mouth and claims everything in it for his own. When he finally pulls away from her, she feels lightheaded, intoxicated.

He speaks again, and it takes Umi a few seconds to catch up and realize that he’s answering her question. “Well for starters,” he grins, “I get to make you forget all about Kurosaki… use my body to wipe all traces of him from your memory. Also,” he goes on, looking at her meaningfully, “I get to see just how high your pain threshold is in a different setting. And if you’re a good girl, I’ll let you return the favor. I might even cry for you,” he adds, his blue eyes darkening.

She isn’t proud of the sound that escapes her mouth at his words. 

“You want to know what I think?” He’s looking at her in that knowing way again. Without waiting for her response, he continues. “I think you wanna tell me yes. I think you wanted to tell me yes before I even asked.” He shrugs. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I think you want me to wipe Kurosaki off your body, but you’ve just been too afraid to ask me if I’ll do the honors.” 

Three years, and his words make her remember things that she thought she’d forgotten. 

Three years, and she still remembers the feel of Ichigo’s tongue on her skin; she still remembers the tingling around her wrists where he’d bound her with Reishi; the weight of him on her as he held her down and drove into her relentlessly, until she saw stars. She remembers the way she felt the first time he used his Reiatsu on her in that setting - how she came so hard she blacked out for a few seconds afterwards. Her face flushes. “If it were that easy, someone else would’ve been able to do it already,” she protests.

“You love him that much?”

Umi hesitates. “It’s more than just that,” she starts, fidgeting in his grasp. “It was love, and it was trust.” 

He holds her still, forcing her to look at him. “Seems like your love and your trust landed you all by yourself while he walked away and slid his cock between another woman’s thighs.”

It feels like a punch to the gut. “It wasn’t….” She trails off.  _ It wasn’t like that,  _ is what she’d been intending to say, but the words die on her lips when she realizes that they aren’t a hundred percent true. Umi knows that even if she and Ichigo had lived a thousand lifetimes together, he would always have gone back to Orihime every single one of those times. “That still doesn’t change what happened between him and I before he left,” she says instead, that old familiar bitterness creeping back into her voice. She hates that bitterness and wishes she could get rid of it once and for all. 

Grimmjow contemplates her for a moment. Umi expects him to speak at the end of that contemplation, and she braces herself for ridicule. Instead, he cups the back of her head with his hand and brings her mouth to his once more in another searing kiss. This kiss is even more intense than the first one; it leaves her reeling, all of her senses heightened, and she wonders if he’s used some sort of magic on her. 

“Let me help you scrub him off you,” he whispers with a grin, when he lets her come up for air. 

The word ‘no’ doesn’t even cross her thoughts, and in the back of her mind, Umi wonders if he’s right: if she has always wanted this… if it’s been what she’s wanted since that night months ago when he showed up in her bar looking for Ichigo. She wonders if this is what a cruel twist of fate feels like: her being sent this supernatural being who is so close to the man she wants, and yet somehow like the dark side of the familiar coin she knows as Ichigo. 

She isn’t sure if it’s this last thought or the way Grimmjow is holding her that makes her feel a little high. 

“So how ‘bout it, skull-face?” He slides his hand down her back, palming her ass and squeezing it, hard. Umi gasps, her eyelids fluttering shut. “Wanna go back to your place and fuck each other up?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just loved the idea of Grimmjow and Umi having this very physically-based relationship that sort of spills over into a more intimate area of life. In both areas, Umi is by no means inexperienced, but she is (as to be expected) less experienced than Grimmjow.
> 
> Even with that gap in experience, and with Grimmjow acting as Umi's teacher in both areas, I wanted their dynamic to be more of a Switch dynamic than having them strictly set in stone into the roles of D/s... hence the reason why Grimmjow is offering Umi the chance to submit herself to the pain play that she's obviously been craving more of, but also why he's sharing with her that part of himself that craves the same thing. 
> 
> In the same vein, though it's probably not as easily recognizable, there is also an emotional dynamic between the two of them that I wanted to explore further, especially in light of Umi's seemingly unbreakable attachment to Ichigo (more on that later, so stay tuned). 
> 
> Just thought I would put that out there before things start to get spicy between these two. :)
> 
> Finally, if you're reading this experimental brainchild of mine, I appreciate you. I'm very excited to be exploring somewhat uncharted territory with these two. I'm glad you're along for the ride with me, and I hope I can continue to make it worth your while. 
> 
> -V


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Umi stares at him, clearly surprised. 
> 
> "What?"
> 
> "I don't know," she shakes her head. "It's almost like you're a different person."

“Did you sleep with him?”

Umi has been turning the question over and over in her mind since they returned to her apartment. She can’t figure out a way to ask it that doesn’t sound awkward and intrusive, but her curiosity overshadows any embarrassment she feels at asking the question. 

Grimmjow turns to face her. He is gloriously, unabashedly naked, and Umi doesn’t even attempt to avert her eyes from his beautifully sculpted body. His gigai is missing the hollow hole that his real body has, and she finds herself absently wondering what it would be like to be with him in his real body. “Kurosaki?” He throws his head back and laughs. “Not that I have anything against it, but why the hell would you think that?”

“You said you taught him things,” Umi shrugs, her face flushed. “Things he used on me.”

“Oh. Hm.” He nods in understanding. “I can see why you’d reach that conclusion,” he concedes. “But no. And the stuff I did teach him was more like shit I threw at him to goad him. He just always seemed so green to me,” he laughs. “It was cute. I didn’t fuck him, though. Granted… I never asked, but I just figured he wasn’t into that,” he adds with another chuckle. 

“But you are?” 

“I’m into whatever feels good,” he grins. “What equipment somebody has doesn’t make or break the experience for me.”

Umi contemplates this silently. 

He leans over and grabs her face in his hands, giving her a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss. “We need to establish some rules,” he says, when he straightens up again. 

“Rules?” Umi looks up at him quizzically. 

“Yes, rules,” he repeats. “You’re a big girl, so you understand the concept of pain play, but in the little world we create in this room, that concept can be put into four categories: pleasure, pleasurable pain, straight pain, and going too far. You’re human, and there is a very distinct difference in your pain tolerance and mine - even when I’m in my gigai. Therefore rule number one is that the last one - going too far - is always off-limits for you.”

“Okay,” she nods. “I can agree with that.” She pauses. “Have you ever gone too far with… with anyone else?”

“That,” he smirks, “is none of your business. Your business is what happens between me and you.”

She shrugs. “I figured it was worth a try to ask.” 

“But if you’re good,” he says, “I might tell you the stories someday.”

Umi doesn’t know why that particular sentence makes her whole body shudder, and not in a bad way.

“Rule number two: Don’t be shy about communication,” Grimmjow tells her. “If you want more of something, or you want me to do it harder, or faster, or in a different way, you need to communicate that. The same goes for if something hurts too much, or you need me to slow down or ease up, or if you need a break. It doesn’t have to be with words,” he adds. “But you need to be vocal. I’m good at reading facial expressions and body language, but I’m much more likely to be able to please you if you use your voice to tell me what you like and don’t like.” He pauses. “We can even set up a non-vocal, physical system for communication,” he goes on thoughtfully. “For those times when you can’t speak… or we’re playing at you not being allowed to speak.”

Umi stares at him, clearly surprised.

“What?” 

“I don’t know,” she shakes her head. “It’s almost like you’re a different person.”

He laughs. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Umi feels a bit sheepish for even bringing it up. “I guess I’m just… seeing a different side of you,” she explains. “I mean, if I’m being honest, I really thought you were just gonna… I don’t know, like… tie me up, flip me face down on the mattress, and do your thing. But you’re actually being incredibly thoughtful and really detailed about this whole thing.” 

He looks mildly offended. “There’s only one thing I enjoy more than fucking, skull-face,” he grins. “And that’s fighting. They’re both art forms, and both require some overlapping sets of skills. Besides,” he goes on, his expression sobering a little. “Not outlining the rules and expectations of something like this is a fantastic way for somebody to get hurt - and not in the good way.”

She accepts this, turning it over in her mind for a moment. “Okay, that’s fair.” 

He drops her a wink, and her stomach drops in response. “Rule number three,” he goes on. “In terms of verbal communication, we both need to choose a safe word. I’m sure you know the general purpose of a word like that, but let me explain it in relation to your time with me: the second you say that word, I remove my hands - and everything else of mine - from your body. That word is a hard stop, period. It does not mean ‘slow down’ or ‘pause so I can take a breather.’ It means ‘cease what you’re doing, move the fuck away from me, and do not touch me again until I explicitly tell you that you can.’ Got it?”

Umi nods. 

“Furthermore,” he goes on, sliding into bed beside her. “Here’s another difference between the other forms of verbal and nonverbal communication that you use, and your safe word: I’m permitted to question you further on your other communication - clarifying questions, if you will. Your safe word is not a negotiable subject. When you use it, you’re not obligated, in that moment, to tell me why. It would probably be a good idea for us to discuss it later, so I can figure out whether or not I need to change something about the way we play… but in that moment when you actually use it, that word is law.” He pauses. “So only use it when you _really_ want me to stop.” 

Umi takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says, trying to suppress the nervous fluttering in the pit of her stomach. She is realizing very quickly that what she’s done in all of her previous sexual encounters has only scratched the surface of what she’s getting ready to do. There is a whole world to this that she has up to now been unaware of, and the thought of it all makes her feel like she might very well be out of her depth. 

“Hey.” He puts his hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at him. “Your Reiatsu is all over the place. You scared?”

“If you’re expecting me to say no,” she starts with a wry smile, “you’re gonna be disappointed.” She shakes her head. “I mean, I’m not, like… _frightened,_ per se. But I’m just realizing that I’m a total novice to all this, and it’s… a little overwhelming.”

“You wanna back out?” His gaze is on her, those bright, sharp eyes searching her expression. There is no judgment in those eyes, and Umi doesn’t feel as though he’s pressuring her one way or the other. He is simply looking, watching her facial expression and body language for cues, and waiting for her to answer. 

“No,” she tells him quickly. “I wanna do this. I’m just… I guess I just didn’t account for how intimidated I would be by your experience,” she confesses. “I mean, you’re like, a thousand leagues ahead of me.” 

He laughs. “ _That’s_ what you’re nervous about?”

“You don’t have to make me sound so silly,” she huffs, crossing her arms over her chest. 

“Listen,” he starts, “if you can handle being thrown around by me in training for months on end, getting thoroughly and well-fucked by me is nothing.” He flashes her a grin. “I promise you’ll find getting thoroughly and well-fucked by me much more pleasant than sparring with me.” His face goes uncharacteristically soft. “Besides, didn’t I tell you that I was fond of you? I wouldn’t damage my favorite toy.”

She nods, and the fluttering in her belly calms a bit. “Yeah,” she admits. “You did say that.”

“Didn’t lie to you, skull-face,” he chuckles softly. “I might not have your trust the way Kurosaki does, but I guarantee you’ll be in good hands with me.”

It dawns on Umi then that she does trust him; up to this point, she has trusted him with her home, and with her body in their training sessions. And though she knows that this new setting is completely uncharted territory with him, she finds solace in the fact that he has yet to betray her trust in either of those other areas. “I believe you,” she says quietly, hoping he can hear the sincerity in her voice. 

Her words seem to surprise him, but he looks pleased. “So,” he starts, after a few seconds of contemplation. “How about I let you think on what you want your safe word to be, and I’ll come back to you in a bit and we can talk about what you like and don’t like, and what’s off-limits for you?”

“Yeah,” she breathes. “That sounds good.”

*******

He feels it a half-second before she does, and it’s a half-second too late. _“Shit,”_ he swears, just as Umi lets out a pained shriek. 

_“Natsu, natsu, natsu,”_ she babbles her safe word frantically, flailing wildly as her eyes glaze over and fill with tears. She’s moving around so much that he can’t focus, can’t concentrate enough to withdraw his Reiatsu from her. 

“Umi, _be still,”_ he says sharply, the edge in his voice more from concern and panic than irritation with her. He splays a hand across her stomach to keep her as still as he can while he tries to unravel the clash of spiritual pressure happening inside of her. _Of course she’s flailing around like she’s being sawed in half,_ he thinks to himself frantically. _This has to hurt like hell, and not in the good kind of way._

It all makes sense now, he realizes grimly - why Umi has not been able to sever her emotional connection to Ichigo, or even to understand and explain why that connection is so powerful. ‘Imprint’ is not nearly strong enough of a word for what’s been done to her. Whether or not it was intentional, Ichigo has marked her with his spiritual pressure, essentially binding her body to his and blocking the flow of any other person’s Reiatsu. 

It’s almost like her body is repelling a virus, the way that Ichigo’s spiritual pressure has started to fight off his own. The two powerful flows of Reiatsu are locked in a battle inside of Umi’s body, and Grimmjow can’t untangle his from Ichigo’s fast enough. “Umi,” he pleads with her gruffly, shaking her shoulders a bit. “I need you to be still. I can’t concentrate if you keep moving like this---”

“What the _hell_ do you think you’re doing?” 

Before he can turn, before he can even think, he’s been shoved unceremoniously off of Umi and pushed into the wall by her bed, hard enough to dent the plaster. Zangetsu is at his throat, wielded by a very angry Kurosaki Ichigo. 

Grimmjow swears under his breath. He’s still in his gigai, and as such he’s without the protective layer of his Hierro, making him vulnerable to being cut by the younger man’s zanpakuto. Any sudden moves could spell disaster for him in his current form. Still, the sight of the man responsible for Umi’s current pain makes him angry. “That’s my line,” he spits, livid. “Why the fuck would you mark her with your Reiatsu if you knew you were gonna leave her?” 

“What are you talking about?” Ichigo’s brown eyes narrow, his gaze shifting from Grimmjow to Umi, who has fainted from the pain. 

Grimmjow glares at him. “Get this fucking zanpakuto out of my face, asshole, and go undo your branding spell.” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about---”

 _“Shut up and listen!”_ He takes a deep breath, trying to keep his head level and his temper under control. Useless screaming won’t help Umi, he knows; it’s obvious Ichigo has no idea of the magnitude of what he’s done to her, and Grimmjow knows he needs to keep calm if he entertains any thought of getting her out of this predicament without her body sustaining any permanent damage. _Shit. She trusted me._ “You branded her,” he explains, trying not to shout. “I don’t know when you did it, but you marked her with your Reiatsu. It means her body is bound to yours, and anyone else who tries to use their spiritual pressure to pleasure her in any way will get the same treatment that an infection invading the body will. In other words, my Reiatsu and yours are fighting each other inside of her,” he goes on, “and if we don’t do something to stop them, it will eventually tear her body apart.” 

Ichigo is looking at him with wide eyes. 

“You felt it,” Grimmjow asserts. “You felt it when I tried. I _know_ you did. That’s why you’re here.” He takes a step forward, not caring anymore if the zanpakuto at his throat cuts him. “So fucking. Take it _off_ of her.” He points to Umi’s prone body. “Now.”

Ichigo hesitates, lowering Zangetsu. “How can I take off something that I wasn’t even aware I’d put on her?”

Incredulous, Grimmjow stares at him. “You’re not serious.”

“You think I would joke about this?”

“You… cannot have been that irresponsible with something like that,” he exhales sharply, unbelieving. It’s all he can do to keep from smashing his fist into the younger man’s face. _That won’t help her,_ he reminds himself, breathing deeply to try and calm himself. “When did you first use your Reiatsu on her body?”

He tries not to fidget impatiently as Ichigo takes a moment to think. “A few months into our relationship,” he admits. 

“Do you remember what you did, and what you said?”

Ichigo hesitates. 

“I’m not asking you to tell me what it was,” the Arrancar snaps impatiently. “I’m asking you if you remember because in order for you to unmark her, you have to do and say the exact same thing you did to mark her.”

Ichigo’s eyes go wide. “I… can’t do that,” he protests. “There has to be another way---”

This time, Grimmjow does hit him. It’s not enough to break anything, but it catches Ichigo off-guard. “Now that I have your attention,” he manages through clenched teeth, “I need you to listen to me. I like you Kurosaki, but at this moment, I don’t give eighty-five flying fucks about you or your pretty little wife waiting for you at home in your bed. What I care about,” he goes on, motioning to the unconscious woman on the bed, “is her and her safety, and undoing what your dumb ass didn’t even realize you’d done in the first place.” He shoves Ichigo toward the bed, hard. “So swallow whatever little bit of misplaced honor and pride you’re using to tell yourself you can’t do this, and _fucking do it._ I’ll even leave so you can do it privately.” His eyes are two chips of ice. “I’m giving you twenty minutes,” he warns the younger man. “Don’t make me kill you.”

*******

_“Can I try something on you?”_

_It’s so cute, Umi thinks, the way he’s blushing. With his red face and his orange hair, he looks like a human fireball. She keeps that thought to herself, though - something tells her that if she mentions that to him, it will kill the mood._

_And killing the mood is the last thing she wants to do._

_“Anything,” she tells him, her voice breathless and strained. He has spent the better part of the last ten minutes with his head buried between her thighs, putting that often-sullen mouth of his to good use. Umi is so high with pleasure that Ichigo could probably ask her to fly to the moon to bring him moon dust, and she would start flapping her arms in preparation to take flight. “Ichigo, you can do anything you want to me.”_

_He smiles at her then, and it’s radiant. Not a smirk, not a grin, not his most common expression of a scowl… but a legitimate, honest-to-goodness smile, and it is like fuel for her heart. He raises himself up on one elbow to watch her, and Umi catches her bottom lip in her teeth as he slides his middle and ring fingers into her slick heat once more._

_It’s different this time, though - she feels the change immediately. It’s reminiscent of the day they met, when she felt like she would be buried under his spiritual pressure. But this time she can feel him pouring that energy into her, changing it from something wild and volatile into something beautiful and soft. “Ichigo,” she exhales shakily._

_“Can you feel that?”_

_She nods. She’s grateful he hasn’t asked her to describe what it feels like, because Umi doesn’t have the words. She only knows the_ feeling, _being connected to Ichigo like she’s never experienced before, not even when he’s been inside of her. She feels his energy, his Reiatsu moving through her body, filling her up, sending little jolts of pleasure up and down all of her nerve endings. She wants to ask him how he’s doing it, even opens her mouth to do so, but the words never make it out. Her body is exploding now, a supernova of pleasure so intense that it dims her vision and briefly steals her consciousness._

_When she comes to, Ichigo is still propped on one elbow, gazing down at her happily. “How do you feel?” He asks gently, tracing soft patterns on her skin with his fingertips._

_She blinks up at him, still feeling a bit dazed. “Um… kinda like I just came so hard that I blacked out?”_

_He laughs. “Yeah,” he tells her. “That happened.”_

_“Oh my god.” Her face is warm; she knows she’s blushing furiously. “What…? How?”_

_“My Reiatsu,” he offers by way of explanation. “I just… told it what to do, and it did it.”_

_“Fuck, I love you,” she laughs, pulling him down for a kiss._

_“I love you too.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey kids... remember to be responsible with the use of your Reiatsu. It might come back to bite you in the ass if you don't. :)


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What's going on?" Orihime asks it again, this time addressing Grimmjow directly. 
> 
> He turns to Ichigo. "You want me to explain, or are you gonna man up and do it?"

“...Ichigo?” Her voice sounds weak, even to her own ears. It isn’t long before she understands why; the sharp, crippling pain that she felt before she lost consciousness is still very much there. 

As is Ichigo. Umi looks up at him, confused. “Ichigo, what… what are you doing here? Where’s Blue?” 

It takes him a second to realize she means Grimmjow. “I felt your Reiatsu do a crazy spike,” he explains, “and I thought someone might be trying to hurt you.”  _ And then I got here and it looked like Grimmjow was trying to… to force himself on you.  _ He leaves that part out of it.

She opens her mouth to ask again where Grimmjow has gone, but the pain knocks the breath out of her. 

“Umi,” he starts uneasily, “can I have your permission to do something?” 

He looks uncomfortable. Umi hasn’t seen this look on his face in a very long time. “What is it?” She manages, gritting her teeth against another sharp wave of pain. Her body feels like it’s being ripped apart from the inside out. She doesn’t know what the source of the pain is, but she gets the feeling that it’s connected to whatever Ichigo is asking her for permission to do. 

“I need…” He trails off, looking away from her a moment before starting again. “I need your permission to take you to Orihime.” 

Umi stares at him. She and Ichigo have not been close in years. Yet, she can still tell when he’s keeping something from her. What he’s said does not sound like what he’d intended to say, and she wonders what the difference is between the two. “Orihime?” The name comes out as a gasp as another ripple of pain assaults her and takes the air from her lungs. “Why?”

“I don’t have time to explain it to you fully,” he says, after just a split second of hesitation. “But I think she might be able to help you with… with this pain you’re having.” 

She knows for sure then that there is something Ichigo is not telling her. She wants to ask him about it, to find out what he’s not sharing with her, but a fresh wave of pain stops her from pursuing a line of questioning that may or may not yield results.  _ He wouldn’t be asking to take me to Orihime if he didn’t think she could help me,  _ she thinks hazily.  _ I don’t know what this is, but if she can make the pain stop, I’ll gladly go.  _ “Alright,” she breathes, gritting her teeth. 

She doesn’t remember everything about the journey; she’s fading in and out of consciousness as Ichigo wraps her robe around her and gathers her in his arms. By the time he’s reached the front door of the clinic, she has fainted again. 

*******

Grimmjow knows the exact moment when Ichigo leaves with Umi; he feels the decrease in spiritual pressure and senses the shift in the air from the movement of Ichigo’s Flash Step. 

“Son of a  _ bitch, _ ” he hisses. It’s ironic, he thinks - in all the time that he’s been here in the living world, he has not been able to sense Ichigo’s spiritual pressure. The latter has been hiding it, Grimmjow knows… but now Kurosaki’s Reiatsu is like a beacon, loud and clear, signaling to Grimmjow exactly where he’s taking Umi. 

“You dumbass,” he swears again, under his breath.  _ Not only were you careless enough to mark her without knowing it,  _ he thinks to himself as he follows the signature of Ichigo’s Reiatsu,  _ but now you’re gonna go get your wife and kid involved in something they have no business even knowing about.  _

He reminds himself to hit Ichigo hard enough to break his jaw next time.

*******

He arrives at the clinic just a few moments after Ichigo and Umi. The younger man turns, unsurprised to see that Grimmjow has followed them. “Orihime can help her,” Ichigo says by way of explanation even though the Espada hasn’t asked. “The basis of her power is reversal. If she can’t undo this, there’s no undoing it at all.” 

“How fucking careless can you be?” Grimmjow snaps. “You really wanna get your wife involved with this?” 

Ichigo’s face flushes. “Of course not,” he snaps back. “But it’s less troublesome than the alternative.” He turns away, not waiting for a response from Grimmjow as he pushes the door to the clinic open. Umi has begun to regain consciousness, and it isn’t long before she’s once again thrashing around in his arms and groaning in pain. 

Her agonized cries bring Orihime sprinting down the stairs into the front room. “Ichigo?” She’s half-asleep, hurriedly wrapping her robe around her pajamas as she recognizes the other woman wriggling in Ichigo’s arms. “What’s going on?” Her gaze falls on Grimmjow then, and her eyes widen. He can see the conclusion she’s come to, and he opens his mouth to speak. 

Surprisingly, Umi beats him to it. “Not… his fault,” she manages. 

“What’s going on?” Orihime asks it again, this time addressing Grimmjow directly. 

He turns to Ichigo. “You want me to explain, or are you gonna man up and do it?” 

Brown eyes glare at him. 

“Fine,” Grimmjow shrugs. “I’ll do it.” Before Ichigo can protest, the Arrancar has turned back toward Orihime. “He marked her with his Reiatsu,” he starts. “Not recently, just so we’re clear, but back when they were together.”

“Marked her?” Orihime repeats the words, not understanding what they mean. 

His patience is growing very thin. “When you use Reiatsu in a sexual setting,” he explains, not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice, “it becomes possible to mark your partner. It’s like a brand on their body, a brand you put on them with your spiritual pressure that sort of customizes your intimate experience together. Once that brand is in place, it stays there until you remove it. And what it means is that anyone else who comes along and tries to use their Reiatsu in a sexual setting will meet resistance from yours. It becomes a problem when the flows of Reiatsu clash with each other. It’s like an internal war that will potentially rip apart the battleground. And in this case,” he adds, motioning to Umi, “the battleground is her body.”

He watches as Ichigo’s mild-mannered wife absorbs this information, processing it in her head and making sense of it. When the gravity of what he’s explained sinks in, her already-wide eyes widen a fraction of an inch more. He can see the question in those eyes before it forms on her lips. 

“The reason why he hasn’t removed it,” Grimmjow says, “is because removing it requires doing exactly what was done to put it in place.” 

Looking at her reaction to his words, it is then that Grimmjow thinks he understands Ichigo’s decision to bring Umi to her. Just for a moment, there is a fluttering of emotions across Orihime’s face. The final emotion is sadness, and then she shutters those feelings into a neutral expression.

“Is this something that can be undone with my Shun Shun Rikka?” She asks the question softly, addressing Grimmjow again. 

“I don’t know,” Grimmjow answers honestly. He motions to Ichigo. “He seems to think so.” 

“Alright,” Orihime says finally, after what feels like an excruciatingly long moment. “Lay her down on the examination table here,” she instructs. “And then you two… please leave the room.”

*******

“What were you doing to her?” 

They are sitting at the kitchen table, as far away as they can get from each other - each at opposite ends - and Grimmjow is so engrossed in his thoughts that he doesn’t hear the question at first. 

“Hey,” Ichigo says loudly, rapping his knuckles on the wood to get the Arrancar’s attention. When Grimmjow looks up at him, he repeats the question, his tone icy. “What were you doing to her?”

“That’s my business and hers,” Grimmjow mutters. “And if it wasn’t for your carelessness, it would’ve stayed our business.”

“It looked like you were hurting her.”

“Because my Reiatsu and yours were fighting each other inside of her body,” Grimmjow points out with an exasperated sigh. “I didn’t have time to withdraw mine before you came barreling in like you were ready to kill someone. You think you’d be having the time of your life if two different shades of spiritual pressure were trying to tear you apart from the inside out?”

Ichigo falls silent at this, his brow furrowed.

“She told you before that what she does is none of your concern,” Grimmjow goes on. He isn’t sure why he’s twisting the knife after he’s already stuck it in. Perhaps it’s because some petty, childish part of him is angry with Ichigo for being able to share something so intimate with Umi - something Grimmjow himself had been planning to introduce to her. “And I told you that I would never damage her.” 

“Damaging and hurting are two different things,” Ichigo retorts. 

“Yeah,” Grimmjow concedes grudgingly. “But I am very careful with my toys, and she’s my favorite.”

Ichigo’s brown eyes flash. “Are you saying she’s just a toy to you?” He stands up, fists balled at his sides. 

“I’m saying that she’s fun to play with, and I’d like to keep playing with her for as long as I can. So no, I wouldn’t damage her.” He looks Ichigo up and down. “And you’d probably be better off staying seated,” he adds, a warning note slipping into his tone. “Your wife is just down the hall, and I’d hate for her to hear me kicking your ass when she’s trying to concentrate.” 

“You bastard---” 

“You know,” Grimmjow interrupts him, “I kept wondering why she had this almost obsessive fixation on you. Couldn’t see why it was always ‘Ichigo this’ and ‘Ichigo that.’ Especially considering the fact that it seems like you royally fucked her over when you left her. But now,” he goes on, “I understand. For somebody like her to be under the influence of such a strong spiritual pressure for such a long time… no wonder she couldn’t move past you.”

“It wasn’t like I did it on purpose,” Ichigo replies defensively. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, now you do.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes, listening to the muffled sounds of Umi’s pained cries. Orihime’s voice is muffled as well, but the tone is soothing. 

“Kurosaki.”

He looks up at the sound of his name. “What.”

“You understand how humiliating this has to be? For both those women in there?” At the blank look on Ichigo’s face, Grimmjow sighs. “Of course you don’t,” he mutters. 

“What would you have wanted me to do?” The younger man shakes his head. “There was no easy choice. And Orihime and I don’t keep secrets from one another.” 

“Why’d you leave her?” He surprises himself with the question, not knowing before he opens his mouth that he’s going to ask it. Grimmjow knows Ichigo’s reason for breaking things off with Umi is none of his business, but he’s keen to know anyway. 

“Umi?” Ichigo also seems surprised. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t,” he retorts. “Not as such. But she does. It’s clearly been bugging her all this time.”

The other man stares at him. “Since when did you start giving a fuck about anybody but yourself?”

Grimmjow scoffs. “Curiosity and giving a fuck are two different things.”

Ichigo is dubious, but he chooses not to voice his doubt. “It’s complicated, anyway.”

“Or maybe it’s simple,” Grimmjow shrugs. “You loved another woman. You always loved another woman. You made the mistake of stringing Umi along thinking that she would cure you of whatever you felt for Orihime. That didn’t work, obviously, and when you realized that, you cut and ran.” He pauses, looking intently at Ichigo. “Did I get it all?”

“You make me sound like a heartless bastard,” the younger man complains. “Just so you know, I didn’t string Umi along. I really did love her, when we were together.” 

“Oh? So what happened?”

“What you said is true,” Ichigo admits quietly. “I always loved Orihime. And I guess there just came a point where I realized it wasn’t fair to Umi for me to keep pretending I didn’t have those feelings for Orihime.” He pauses. “But how exactly are you supposed to tell someone that you’ll never love them as much as you love someone else?”

He opens his mouth to respond, but the sound of Umi shrieking interrupts him. He pushes his chair back from the table, his intention to go into the room down the hall and see what the hell is going on. Ichigo’s hand on his arm stops him. 

“Orihime knows what she’s doing,” Ichigo says quietly. “I trust her, and you should, too. Or did you forget who gave you back your arm in Hueco Mundo?”

He waits, standing stiffly with his head inclined towards the sound. Umi’s shrieks stop, and he sits down again. 

“Huh,” Kurosaki is looking at him curiously. “I think you actually do give a fuck.”

“So what if I do,” Grimmjow snaps. 

“I’d say it’s a first for you,” Ichigo laughs. 

Grimmjow still looks irritated. “I gave a fuck about you too, dumbass,” he mutters. “Til you went off and started a whole new life.”

Ichigo’s eyes widen. “I---”

“I’m training her,” Grimmjow interjects. “She didn’t tell you about me sticking around because she didn’t want you feeling like you had to protect her. She was trying to move on from you, in her own way,” he explains. “She’s getting really good at fighting too, you know… could probably give you a run for your money now, even without you holding back on her.”

“So you’ve been with her this whole time?”

He shrugs. “I was bored.” 

Once again, Ichigo has the fleeting thought that the Arrancar’s actions speak of something more than just boredom. And once again, he keeps the thought to himself. 

In the silence that follows, Orihime enters the kitchen. Her expression is unreadable as she turns to address Grimmjow. “She’s free of Ichigo’s Reiatsu now,” she reports quietly. “But the extraction took a lot out of her, so she’s very tired. She’ll need a lot of rest for the next few days.” 

“Thanks,” he offers gruffly, taking it as his cue to collect Umi and take her back to her apartment. 

“She kept asking for you,” Orihime adds, and there is surprisingly the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “It took me a while to figure out who ‘Blue’ was, but once I did, I realized she was looking for you.” She pauses. “Please take care of her.” 

*******

The sun is shining when Umi wakes. It’s muted sunlight, filtering through the cracks in the closed blinds in her bedroom. Her body is sore, like she’s run a marathon, and she struggles to recall why she feels that way. 

_ Oh… right,  _ she remembers.  _ That whole…  _ thing  _ happened.  _ It comes back to her with clarity, and she groans. 

“What’s that noise for, skull-face?”

Startled, she jumps at the sound of his voice. He is currently occupying the other side of her bed, lounging against the headboard in just his skin. “You…” She trails off. “You brought me back.” 

“Yeah.” Casually, he looks her up and down. “Still hurting?”

“A little,” she admits. “But nothing like before.” She pauses to stretch, testing the soreness of her muscles. “I’m mostly achy, almost like I’ve just worked out.” 

“Hm.” 

She peers at him closely. “You were worried about me,” she says in a singsong voice. 

“Wasn’t.”

“You were,” Umi insists. “Don’t lie. You took me to Kurosaki clinic.”

He shakes his head. “You must have hallucinated that,” he starts. “Or don’t you remember? Wasn’t me who carried you there.” 

“No,” Umi answers firmly, shaking her head. “I know it was Ichigo who carried me there. But you were there too.” She looks up at him. “You were angry with him. You didn’t say it, but I could tell.” 

Grimmjow shrugs. “Anybody would’ve been,” he says, his tone nonchalant. “What he did was stupid and irresponsible, even if he didn’t realize what he was doing at the time.” 

She looks at him for a long time. “Sorry our night got ruined,” she says finally, her voice low. 

“Stop apologizing for shit that isn’t your fault,” he snaps at her, but there is no real irritation in his voice. “And stop giving me nicknames without me knowing it.” 

Confused, she inclines her head to the side. “Nicknames?”

“You called me ‘Blue’ twice, but not to my face.” 

“I really don’t remember that,” she laughs. “But I do like it. I think I’ll start calling you that - to your face - from now on.” 

“Tch,” he scoffs. “Silly woman.” 

“How long have I been asleep?” She asks, after a while. 

“A day and a half.”

_ “A day and a half?”  _ She screeches, sitting up in shock. Her head doesn’t like the sudden movement, and the room starts to swim. 

“Hey, take it easy,” he warns her, putting his hands on her shoulders to steady her. “Unless you wanna pass out again.”

“How have I been asleep for so long?” Umi wonders frantically. “I’ve missed two nights of work---”

“Oh, I went there,” he says absently, running a hand through his hair. “I told the nosy woman you weren’t coming.” 

“The nosy woman,” Umi murmurs. “Hitoka?”

Grimmjow shrugs. “Maybe. The one with the purple hair.” 

“Hitoka,” Umi confirms. “What did you tell her?”

Exasperated, he sighs. “I told her you were sick and wouldn’t be coming to work for a couple days. Think she got the wrong idea, ‘cause she winked at me like I’d just told her a secret or something.” 

“I bet she did,” Umi groans, half-embarrassed and half-amused. “I’m sure there’ll be no end to the teasing once I get back.” She peers at him closely. “You did that for me? You went down to my job and did that?”

“You know,” he starts irritably, “I liked you better when you were still out cold and couldn’t talk my fucking head off.” 

“Liar,” she laughs. She moves closer to him, hesitantly at first, tucking herself under his arm and snuggling against his side. The look of shock on his face is comical, and it makes her laugh harder. “Relax,” she says, reaching up to pinch his cheek. 

They’re silent that way for a while: Grimmjow half-sitting up with his back against the headboard, and Umi curled into his side, her head resting on his chest. “I want to stay like this for a while,” Umi says quietly, closing her eyes. “It’s nice this way. And later,” she adds, her words becoming muffled as she yawns, “I want to pick up where we left off before we were interrupted.” She pauses, raising her head and opening her eyes briefly to look up at him. “Is that okay with you?” 

“Yeah,” he says, after a moment. “That’s okay with me.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't have the heart to leave poor Umi in pain. :)


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What... the hell?" It comes out barely louder than a whisper, but his keen hearing picks up on it anyway, and he turns to face her. "What are you doi---?" She stops herself when she realizes that her eyes, ears, and nose have answered her question for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so the smut avalanche begins. Granted, it's a slow-rolling avalanche, but it has begun moving. :)
> 
> Also, some _feelings._

When Umi wakes again, it’s dark, and she’s alone in bed. The clock on the nightstand tells her that it’s just past seven p.m. She sits up, rubbing her eyes and peering around the dimly lit room. Through the open bedroom door, she can hear faint noise coming from the kitchen. 

She hunts around briefly for her robe, finding it draped over the desk chair. “Not where I usually put it,” she says with a smile. “But you tried, and I appreciate that.” Once she has the soft fabric belted at her waist, she makes her way to the source of the noise in the kitchen. 

When she rounds the corner, she is greeted with an unexpected sight. 

“What… the hell?” It comes out barely louder than a whisper, but his keen hearing picks up on it anyway, and he turns to face her. “What are you doi---” She stops herself when she realizes that her eyes, ears, and nose have answered her question for her. 

“Figured you might be hungry,” the Arrancar in her kitchen mumbles - a bit sheepishly, Umi notes - as he points to the plate of steaming rice balls on the kitchen counter. “Took me a while to figure out where everything was, but…” He trails off, punctuating the unfinished sentence with a shrug. 

There are also vegetables, fish, and soup laid out on a tray. “You made all this?” She looks up at him incredulously. 

“Try not to sound so shocked,” Grimmjow mutters. 

“No, I just---” She laughs. “Well, if I’m being honest, I  _ am  _ a little bit surprised,” she admits. “Excuse me for saying it, but I don’t think you strike anybody as the domestic type.” 

He actually  _ growls.  _

“Point taken,” Umi snickers. “One cooked meal does not mean you’ve been tamed.” Her eyes and her nose have begun communicating with her stomach, which rumbles noisily. “And right on time, too,” she adds, seating herself at the table. “Mind if I dig in?”

Grimmjow shrugs again. “Do what you want. Was gonna bring it to you if you didn’t come out, but you saved me the trouble.” He joins her at the table, sitting across from her and peering at her closely. “You okay?” He asks after a moment. 

Umi knows the question is an inquiry that goes much deeper than the casual way he’s asked it. He’s looking for candor, and it’s only fair to give it to him. “I guess,” she starts, when she’s finished chewing and swallowing a mouthful of rice. “I feel different,” she admits. “And I know it’s probably the fact that I’m not… filled with Ichigo’s Reiatsu anymore. But those places that he filled before, they all feel empty now, like something important is missing.” 

He frowns. “Thought you might say that.”

“Does that bother you?” She asks it quietly, her eyes on her bowl. If honesty is what they are exchanging now, she doesn’t want to run the risk of an awkward gaze being the reason he can’t tell her the truth. 

“Like it would,” he says, a little too breezily. 

“Grimmjow---”

“Thought you planned to start using your little nickname for me, skull-face,” he cuts her off with a grin. 

“Blue,” she says softly, smiling in spite of the gravitas of the conversation they are having. “Blue…” She repeats it, her features going serious. “I don’t know… I thought that I would wake up and things would be different. Like fixing the problem of my invisible connection to him would magically wipe all my feelings away.” She shakes her head. “I guess it doesn’t really work that way.”

He nods. “Yeah, well. I’d love to say I’m surprised, but considering his track record with me, it makes perfect sense.”

Umi isn’t sure what he means by that. “His track record with you?”

“Yeah.” He stands up, flashing her another grin. “Anyway, come find me when you feel well enough to spar again.” 

It isn’t until he starts to turn away that Umi realizes his intentions. “What? Wait, no,” she protests, grabbing at the cuff of his jacket. “Where are you going?”

“Gettin’ out of your hair,” he replies, gently shaking her arm off of his jacket. “Like the good healer with the orange hair said… you need rest, right?”

Something about his words and the way he’s speaking to her frustrates Umi, but she can’t put her finger on exactly why. “I’m tired of resting. Besides, I thought we would pick up where we left off,” she says, her voice colored with uncertainty. “Or did I dream that?”

It stops him for a moment, and he studies her. “What do you want from me, Umi?” The grin that was there before is gone, his expression unreadable.

“What kind of question is that?”

“A legitimate one.” He shakes his head. “I think maybe I gave you the wrong idea about me,” he goes on, his sharp blue eyes looking past her, at something she can’t see. “I can’t be him. I’m never gonna be him. So if what you’re looking for is a replacement for him, I’m not your man. Can’t be what he is.”

_ Oh.  _ “Is that what you think I want?” She asks the question softly, wanting to know the answer but afraid he won’t tell her. 

“Isn’t that what you’ve been wanting this whole time?” He finally looks at her. That devil-may-care grin is plastered back on his face, and for some reason it’s what frustrates Umi the most. 

“Are you that stupid?” She huffs the question, partially in anger and partially in frustration - although whether the two emotions are directed at him or herself, she can’t tell. “No, let me rephrase it - do you think  _ I’m  _ that stupid?”

He shrugs again, and Umi thinks it’s probably one of the most maddening things she’s ever experienced. She pushes her chair back from the table, standing to look up at him and meet his eyes. “I  _ know  _ you’re not Ichigo,” she starts, enunciating each word slowly and clearly to make sure she’s heard. “I thought I wanted you to be his replacement,” she admits, shaking her head. “But that was wrong, and I was wrong for even thinking about it.” She reaches up, placing her hands on his shoulders. “My issues with him are just that -  _ my  _ issues. My feelings about him and our history together… those are something that I have to work out. To move past on my own. Now that I’ve properly severed the connection between us that kept me from being able to, it should be a lot easier. I know it won’t happen overnight,” she adds, “but it  _ will  _ happen. And when it does, I don’t want to look around and find out that you’re gone, too.”

“So what the fuck are you saying, Umi?”

“I’m saying I want you to  _ stay,”  _ she sighs, shaking his shoulders a bit. “I don’t want you to fly off into the ether where I can’t find you. It doesn’t seem like you’re keen to go back to… wherever the hell you were before you came here, anyway. I want you to stay here, and keep training me hard enough to be able to kick your ass for real some day. I want you to stay because the bed is just the right size when you’re in it, and you’ve revealed to me you’re actually a pretty decent cook. I want you to stay because the apartment, and my life, are less lonely when you’re around. I want you to stay and teach me all sorts of new, kinky shit in the bedroom, and to use your Reiatsu on me to make me forget about every other man I’ve known intimately - including that orange-haired dumbass across town.” She sighs again. “I’m not asking you to love me,” she adds quietly. “I’m just asking you not to leave me.”

“Tch,” he scoffs, but there is a fondness in his eyes when he looks at her. “You really are troublesome.”

“So stay here,” Umi laughs, leaning up on her tiptoes to brush her lips against his, “and keep me out of trouble. Unless,” she adds slyly, leaning back to look at him, “you don’t feel like you’re up to the challenge.”

Sparks of heat flash in clear blue eyes like lightning on a sunny day.

“Well shit,” Umi murmurs, her spine tingling, “I guess  _ I’m _ in trouble now.”

*******

Trouble, as it turns out, is exactly what Umi is looking for. 

_ I feel like I’m in high school again.  _ It’s the thought that flickers across the front of her brain and turns her mouth up into a smile. Her lips, at the moment, are pressed against Grimmjow’s, and the feel of her smile makes him pull back and disengage from the kiss. 

“What’s so funny?” He asks, his blue eyes trained intently on her face. 

“It’s silly,” she smiles, shifting slightly in his lap. “I was just thinking that this whole scenario makes me feel a little like a teenager again.”

He quirks an eyebrow at her curiously, his way of asking for an explanation.

Umi reaches up, one hand leaving his shoulder to brush a stray strand of hair out of his face. “Hot guy in my bed, me in his lap, making out like it’s the last kiss we’ll ever have,” she chuckles. 

He laughs, running his hands up her naked sides, and it makes Umi shudder a bit. They’ve been at this for a while - making out - and it has reminded her just how long it has been since she’s gotten intimate with anyone. “Do you like it?” He asks, after a moment. 

It’s a question he’s asked her more than once over the course of the time they’ve been at it. At first, Umi imagined it was because she was somehow unknowingly sending signals to him that she wasn’t keen on the things he was doing. Very quickly, she realized that isn’t why he’s asking. 

Once again, she’d wrongly assumed something about him: that he would simply decide what he thought she might like and use that as the basis for his intimate interaction with her. She had been under the impression that they would dive right into play and figure things out along the way. 

She’d been wrong about that. This, she thinks, is much more agreeable. 

“I do,” she tells him quietly, shifting again. There is nothing between them - no fabric, no space, no bashful inhibitions - and she relishes the feel of her bare skin against his. Her entire body is warm and flushed, and his cool skin is a welcome sensation against that heat. Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez is cold by nature, and Umi wonders if he has always been that way or if it is a byproduct of him being in the living world.

He cups the back of her head with one hand, bringing her lips back to his in a smoldering kiss. She’s so distracted by the now-familiar feeling of his tongue in her mouth that she almost doesn’t notice his other hand slipping between her thighs. Umi knows she’s wet, but she doesn’t realize just how wet she is until she feels his finger toying with her, the tip of that cool digit circling her hot, soaked entrance. “Ngh,” she moans into his mouth. It elicits a chuckle from him but he doesn’t break the kiss, even when he slips two long, slender fingers inside of her. Umi could swear she feels sparks on his fingertips, and she pulls back to look at him. 

“What?” He asks huskily, the corners of his mouth lifted in a smirk. 

Umi opens her mouth to respond, but the rush of pleasure between her legs steals all the words - and the breath - from her. She feels it again, this time recognizing it for what it is: light touches of his Reiatsu, pulsing into her from the tips of his fingers, swirling inside of her. She remembers the ghost of this feeling from when he’d started to do it before. “Ah-h,” she breathes, clenching hard around his fingers.  _ “Fu...uck.” _

He adds a third finger, twisting his hand slightly to grind his palm against her clit. In the silence of the room, she can hear her heavy breathing and the wet sucking sounds his fingers make as they pump in and out of her. It makes her face flush. 

He’s still smirking at her. “You hear that?” He asks, almost as though he can read her mind. “So wet… I wonder what it would take to make you cream all over my fingers, hm?”

The flush on her face grows deeper. Her cheeks are on fire now. 

“I could probably keep doing this,” he drawls, leaning back until his shoulders touch the headboard. His fingers briefly pause in their ministrations, and Umi has to fight to keep a whimper from escaping. She can still feel the tendrils of his Reiatsu, stilled at the same time that his fingers stopped moving, but pulsing inside of her all the same. “You seem to like it,” he says after a moment, sliding his fingers out of her. This time Umi does whimper, and he grins like the cat that got the canary. 

He holds up the hand that he’s just withdrawn, spreading his fingers out in front of her face. “Look at that,” he starts, his eyes on the strand of her arousal connecting his middle and index fingers. “All that, just for me?” He wiggles his fingers, and before she has even realized it, Umi’s lips have parted slightly. Grimmjow takes this as an invitation, putting his hand to her mouth. “Say ‘ahh.’” It’s not quite a command, but Umi obeys anyway. The slide of his fingers onto her tongue is slow and erotic. He grips her chin with his other hand, lifting it and forcing her to meet his gaze. “Just like that,” he purrs, sliding the wet digits as far back as they can go. Umi almost gags on them, but he stops just short of triggering that reflex, and she wonders if it’s a skill that he has developed or if it’s just luck. He holds them there for just a minute, watching her, before withdrawing them. 

In an instant he has flipped their positions, and Umi finds herself staring up at him from the mattress. He has her pinned, one hand around the side of her neck, the other back between her thighs, toying lazily with her clit. She can feel his Reiatsu again, following whatever silent commands he’s giving it. It’s no longer just limited to where his fingers are ghosting over her slick heat; very keenly she feels it moving through her body, dancing over her skin, setting alight areas she didn’t even know were sensitive. 

His hand tightens around her throat just as he plunges two fingers back into her, and Umi spasms around him, her whole body shuddering at the dual sensations. “What’s your color?” He asks her softly. She lifts one hand slightly, using her index finger to tap his thigh once.  _ Green.  _

“Good,” he grins. He tightens his grip on her throat minutely again, pressing his thumb into her clit, and once again Umi is hit with an onslaught of dual sensations. It becomes a rhythm of sorts: the squeezing of his hand around her throat pulses in time with his fingers sliding in and out of her, his thumb caressing her clit. He’s deliberately slow in his pace, languid strokes in and out of her that are not quite enough to bring her to orgasm. He watches her intently, his blue eyes cataloguing every expression on her face, every twitch of her muscles. 

He squeezes her throat a little tighter, speeding up the fingers slipping in and out of her, then withdrawing them altogether after a few seconds to focus on her clit. His strokes have become hard and fast, rubbing in an upward motion. She can feel the pressure of his fingers around her neck, firm enough to make breathing just slightly difficult, but not enough to hurt. His assault on her clit is relentless, and Umi starts to squirm under him, the pleasure just this side of unbearable. His eyes flash to hers, his eyebrows raised. She lifts her hand, taps her finger on his thigh once.  _ Still green.  _ Chuckling, he leans over her, fingers still slipping up and down over her clit. Her whole body spasms just before she comes, and in that instant his fingers around her neck squeeze tighter, giving Umi a brief sensation of lightheadedness, before he releases her completely with a soft groan. 

_ “Fuck,”  _ she gasps, tears at the corners of her eyes. She’s still spasming from the rush - clenching emptily around nothing, the muscles in her legs twitching and shaking. It isn’t until she catches her breath that she realizes the space on the sheet beneath her feels much wetter than it should be. “Did I---?” She glances down to look. “Oh,” she says softly, looking back up at Grimmjow. “Well… I guess we both enjoyed that,” she laughs. 

To her surprise, he actually  _ blushes.  _ Grimmjow blushing is cuter than she could have imagined, and Umi wonders who she has to pay to keep those two faint spots of pink on his cheeks for as long as she can. On a whim, she reaches out, running her index finger through a trail of his come. Before he can say a word, she’s slipped the finger inside of her mouth.

“Fucking hell,” he groans, shutting his eyes. “You can’t… do shit like that.”

“Why can’t I?” Umi asks, her words muffled around the finger still in her mouth. “It’s not in the rules.”

Instead of the snappy comeback she’s expecting, he pulls her closer to him, placing a hand on her chin and lifting it. “You okay?” His eyes are serious, searching. 

“Yeah,” Umi nods. “I’m okay.”

Those sharp blue eyes stay on her for a moment longer. Then, seemingly satisfied with whatever he’s looking for, he smiles. “Good.” He shifts to get up, and Umi makes a noise of dismay. “Oh?” He turns back to face her. “What was that?”

“Where are you going?” 

“To get you water,” he laughs. 

“I don’t need any,” she protests, wrinkling her nose. “I’m not thirsty.”

“You will be soon,” he answers, and the smoldering look he gives her is enough to shut her mouth and send a shudder through her whole body. 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her hand stops. "Why do you hate him so much?"
> 
> The look of surprise on his face is genuine. "Hate him? What makes you think I hate him?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The only excuse I have for this chapter is that my head was firmly in the gutter when I wrote it. Ergo, the avalanche continues...

When he returns, he’s carrying a glass of water and onigiri wrapped in a napkin. “You should go use the bathroom,” he tells her, setting the water and the rice ball on her desk. “And when you come back, have this.”

She looks at him quizzically. “But I feel fine.”

“I know you do,” Grimmjow grins. “And what I’m telling you to do is meant to keep you that way.” He tugs playfully at a lock of her hair. “Remember you’re working your way up the intensity ladder here. Can’t have you passing out later because you were hungry or dehydrated.”

Umi nods, sliding off of the bed to make her way to the bathroom. She can feel him watching her, his eyes like twin blue flames licking a trail of heat up and down her body. It makes Umi’s skin flush in anticipation for whatever he has planned next. 

When she gets back into the bedroom, he’s waiting for her on the bed, stretched out on his side like some kind of god straight out of a mythology book. She pauses in the doorway, taking a few moments to really appreciate the view. 

“See something you like?” He’s smirking at her, watching her ogle him. 

“Got a problem with it if I do?” She shoots back, hands on her hips. 

“Drink your fucking water and then come find out.”

Laughing, she makes short work of the onigiri, washing it down with the water. She sets the empty glass back on her desk and saunters over to the bed. In her absence, he’d put a towel over the wet spot on the sheet, and Umi climbs in next to him, rolling onto her side to face him. “You’re gorgeous,” she says after a moment, reaching out and running her hand over his chest. Her palm meets a solid wall of muscle underneath the scarred skin, and she bites her bottom lip appreciatively. 

“Yeah?” His voice is low and gravelly. “Even though my hair’s the wrong color?”

Her hand stops. “Why do you hate him so much?”

The look of surprise on his face is genuine. “Hate him? What makes you think I hate him?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Umi starts, her fingertips tracing patterns on his pectorals. “Maybe the way you talk about him, like he’s your sworn mortal enemy or something.” 

It makes him chuckle, but she isn’t sure why. “Don’t hate him,” he says after a moment. “He’s my rival, not my enemy.” He rolls onto his back, clasping Umi’s waist and bringing her with him. When he looks up at her, there’s amusement in his eyes, but there is also something strangely vulnerable there that she’s never seen before. “Maybe it’s jealousy, hm?”

Quizzically, she looks down at him. 

“Don’t you ever feel that?” He asks the question quietly, in that same low tone. His clear blue eyes never leave her face. 

Umi thinks of Orihime then: that kind, gentle, mild-mannered woman Ichigo loves. She recalls the sight of his retreating back and the feel of bitter tears on her cheeks. She remembers the market she used to love to frequent, the one she and Ichigo would go to together at least three times a week. The one she stopped going to when she once encountered a very pregnant Orihime there. 

“Yeah,” she says softly. “Yeah, I do.” 

“Guess we’re two of a kind then, huh skull face?” She looks down at him again, and he has scrubbed everything but the amusement off of his face. He’s grinning up at her now, his hands resting on her hips. 

She hasn’t forgotten that brief glimpse of vulnerability in his eyes, though she will probably never mention it to him. She wants to make him forget, but most of all she wants to make herself forget. She leans down, covering his lips with hers in a fervent kiss. It’s easy to shut that part of her brain up when she focuses on the sensations: the warm, wet pulse of his tongue against hers as she kisses him senseless; the slide of his hands on her hips, big and rough and chilly to the touch, his thumbs rubbing slow circles on her flushed skin; the way she can feel him hardening beneath her, velvet covered steel pressed against her thigh, the only part of him that is truly warm. She is surrounded by him - drowning in this rude, contradictory Arrancar who came breezing into her life when she apparently needed him the most. She suddenly feels very empty, the ache between her thighs begging to be filled and wanting to feel his now-dormant Reiatsu flowing through her again.

Umi breaks the kiss to look down at him again. “I want you,” she tells him baldly, her face heated by honesty and the intensity of his gaze. “I make a formal motion that we put a pause on the experimentation and you just… let me… fuck you,” she finishes. 

Grimmjow’s eyes flash, gone a darker blue with arousal, but he says nothing… opting instead to move one hand from her hip to her thigh, tapping his index finger gently on her skin, once.  _ Green.  _

It makes her smile. She slides one hand up his chest, bracing herself while she uses the other to take him in hand. Umi has seen him fully erect, but wrapping her hand around him now, feeling the weight of him in her palm makes her realize very quickly just how damn big he is. Inhaling deeply, she shifts her hips, lining his thick, blunt tip up at her slick entrance. 

“Slow,” he advises her, his voice barely above a whisper as he holds her hips in his hands, giving her the support she needs to focus on what she’s doing. It takes her a couple of tries - she’s still hot and slick from his previous ministrations between her legs, and he keeps slipping just past where she needs him to go. Finally he helps her, an amused smile on his face at her predicament. He covers her hand with his, slowly guiding it and himself to the right place. Umi’s eyes meet his, and the intensity there almost makes her come on the spot. He certainly knows how to make his gaze hold weight. 

He breaches her languidly, her muscles tight around the head of his cock, the wet push of her taking him in seeming to fill the quiet room. “Ng,” she exhales, feeling the stretch as he helps her sink down on him slowly, inch by inch. The nerve endings where they’re joined are tingling with pleasure, and she marvels at how quickly she has learned to identify the signature of his spiritual pressure moving through her. When it dawns on her that he’s using reishi to stimulate those nerve endings and make the task of taking him in for the first time more comfortable, she looks down at him again. He’s grinning up at her, a little smugly. 

“Thought you could use some help,” he rasps. The fingertips digging into her sides belie his easygoing demeanor - she knows he’s feeling the intensity just as much as she is. “Might not have fit otherwise.”

Umi wants to protest, to hurl a snarky comment at him that will wipe that smug grin right off of his face. But she can’t, because she knows he’s right - even with the aid of his Reiatsu, he is still stretching her as far as she can go, filling her utterly to the brim and beyond. Instead, she does what she can: clenches around him as hard as her internal walls will allow her to. 

_ “Fuck,”  _ the word is dragged out of him, and Umi exhales in a self-satisfied sigh as his expression goes from smug to strained in two seconds flat. He grips her hips firmly, keeping her still. “Could happily die a second time this way,” he pushes out through gritted teeth. “Cock stuffing you full, your pretty tits in my face.”

“How romantic,” Umi replies, the sarcastic tone she’d been trying for undermined by the want in her voice. At this angle, with him seated so deeply inside of her, Umi can swear she feels every ridge, every vein, every single pump of blood going through his cock. 

“Didn’t you know?” He laughs, but even that sounds strained. “Romance is my thing, skull face.” He reaches up, cupping the back of her head in his hand, pulling her down close for another kiss as he bends his knees and plants his feet firmly on the mattress. It shifts her angle, and her gasp is swallowed into his mouth. Her head goes empty for a moment when he encircles her hips with that iron grip of his, holding her still and thrusting slowly up into her. “Just… like that,” he grunts softly. 

Umi is completely at his mercy, and in the back of her mind she marvels at the sheer amount of strength and self-control he’s exhibiting. He lifts her hips as though she weighs nothing, loosening his grip just the right amount to let her slide back down on him as he brings his hips up to meet hers. Every push is accompanied by the feel of the reishi he’s controlling with his spiritual pressure - little jolts of electricity pricking at her hot, textured walls in tandem with his thrusts. It’s unlike anything she’s ever experienced before… not with any man, nor any toy. She has the sudden urge to kiss him again, to feel his lips on hers. The smug look on his face is back, this time in the form of his signature toothy grin, and Umi can’t help herself; she leans over, pressing her mouth to his. Grimmjow opens up for her willingly, and Umi lets him slow-fuck her mouth with his tongue, in much the same way his lower half is doing to hers. 

She isn’t sure if it’s his Reiatsu that’s responsible for how intensely she feels everything: the sparks on his fingertips as he presses them into her; the way he kisses her until she feels lightheaded and flushed all over; how he’s angled her so that her clit brushes against that downy patch of pale blue hair; the slide of him inside of her, thick and hot and heavy and just this side of too much. He keeps her balanced precariously on the edge of orgasm for what seems like days… so long that Umi isn’t aware of the quiet whimpering noises she’s been making until he brings it to her attention with a low chuckle.

“So pretty when you cry like that,” he grins up at her. “Almost makes me wanna drag this out forever.”

His words go straight through her, and her body’s response is to clench tightly around him. She’s so close; the nerves at the base of her spine are tingling, coil low in her belly wound tight enough to snap. The sudden pressure of her contracting muscles around him elicits a long, low groan from him, blue eyes fluttering shut momentarily. When he looks back up at her again, there is fire in his eyes. Umi’s mouth is set to ask him what he’s up to, but before she can, he has lifted her completely off of him, sliding out of her with a very audible pop. 

“No,” she wails, feeling very empty at the sudden loss of him, “you  _ fucking tease.”  _ She squirms in his arms, hands reaching down to bring him back towards where she wants him most, but he is an immovable rock. 

_ “Relax,”  _ he grunts, his mouth twitching into a smirk. He rolls them, pinning her under his body. He spreads her open wide, testing the limits of her flexibility as he drapes her legs over his broad shoulders. “Just wanted to see you under me,” he tells her by way of explanation when she looks up at him quizzically. 

“You son of a bi---” The words are cut off abruptly into a shuddering gasp when he slides his length along her soaked slit. She squirms as much as she can, trying to propel her hips forward and urge him in. 

“Say please,” he murmurs into the skin of her throat before pressing a kiss there. “And I might let you have the tip.”

Umi knows she’s still completely at his mercy. He’s got her nearly folded in half now, legs over his shoulders as he presses his upper body against hers. She can feel the scar on his chest rubbing against her breasts, the friction making her nipples stand taut. His lips, teeth, and tongue are worrying the skin at her throat, alternating between hot, open-mouthed kisses and playful nips that she’s sure will leave a series of marks. She can feel him, hot and heavy and still very hard, maddeningly close to her entrance but not moving any further. 

“Please,” she whispers, without even a split second of hesitation. 

Grimmjow leans back to look at her. His expression is pleased but not nearly as smug as Umi is expecting. It isn’t until he cants his hips forward to sheath himself back inside of her that she realizes that in a way, he’s also very much at her mercy. She finds it oddly amusing, and a breathless chuckle escapes her as he begins to move within her once more. 

This time there is nothing languid about his pace: he is thrusting in and out of her as hard and as fast as her body will allow him to, setting a punishing rhythm that Umi is sure she’s going to pay for with sore muscles and the inability to walk come morning. He’s got his face buried in her throat again, muffling his grunts into her sweat-slicked skin. Umi gives as good as she gets, raking her nails down his shoulders hard enough to hurt, and the way he hisses is an indication that she won’t be the only one with souvenirs from the night come morning. She can feel him regathering the reishi inside of her, those tendrils of spiritual magic, and it doesn’t take long at all for whatever silent commands he’s giving them to take effect. He reaches down, working one hand into the tight space between their bodies to stroke at her clit, and Umi is lost. There is no turning back from the avalanche of stimulation he’s giving her from all sides. She comes, spasming and fluttering wildly around his cock, her legs shaking and her back arching off of the mattress, even under his weight. 

Grimmjow doesn’t miss a second of her orgasm, his eyes focused intently on her as she loses herself to the pleasure. She’s so pretty this way: flushed and warm and glowing with a sheen of sweat from their exertions. Soft, wordless cries fall from her mouth, her eyes squeezed shut so tightly that tears slip out of the corners. She’s pulsing and shuddering around him, and he lets himself give in to the sensations. He pulls out of her and finishes on her skin, his groan loud and long. 

They’re both silent for a few moments. He rolls off of her and to her side, chest heaving as he catches his breath. Finally, Umi speaks. 

“You made a mess,” she says, turning her head and looking at him with teasing eyes. 

“So what if I did?” He grins at her. “You like it.”

“Maybe I do.” She keeps her eyes on him, letting her fingers drift down to the sticky white ribbons on her breasts and stomach, spreading the mess onto her fingertips. “All this, just for me?” Her tone playfully echoes his words to her from earlier as she raises her hand to show him. 

His voice is a ragged, gutteral thing when he speaks again. “Keep that up, and you’re gonna find yourself in a world of trouble.” 

“It’s okay,” Umi grins, eyes flashing. “Your kind of trouble is the kind I like.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wonder what's next on the Ladder of Intensity? That's for me to know and you to find out. :)


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Well," he smirks, reaching down and tweaking her nipple. She squirms, and his grin widens. "One good turn deserves another, skull-face. Time for you to talk."
> 
> "Me?" She looks up at him in surprise. "What about?"

“Can I ask you a question?”

“No.”

The look she shoots him at his refusal could melt the skin off of a lesser man; Grimmjow merely smirks at her. 

“What’s your question, skull-face?”

“Is it true that Hollows have holes because they’ve lost their hearts?”

He looks at her sharply. “What makes you ask?”

Umi shifts to sit cross-legged and face him. “I’m just curious. Ichigo told me that once. He said it’s why Hollows hate Shinigami; because Hollows are souls that Shinigami didn’t save in time.”

“Yeah,” Grimmjow nods. “That’s right.”

She considers this for a moment, chewing her lower lip thoughtfully. “That’s actually… really sad,” she concludes. 

He looks at her in surprise. “You think so?”

“You don’t?”

“Never thought about it as sad or happy,” he shrugs. “Just a Hollow’s lot in life, I guess.”

This gives her pause. “What were you like before?” She asks quietly. “When you were a human, I mean?”

“The hell you wanna know that for?”

“Because I’m curious,” she tells him. 

“You’re curious about a lot,” he laughs. 

It’s Umi’s turn to shrug. “Is it so weird for me to want to know things about you?” Before he can answer, she goes on. “Like, you’re not just a casual fuck I met at the bar. You’ve been around for a while, and it seems like you intend to stick around for a while. I think you’re interesting, and I’m interested in knowing things about you.” 

Once again, her words seem to catch him by surprise. Umi watches his lips turn down in a frown, his brow creased. 

“Wasn’t such a bad guy,” he starts. “Wasn’t a saint, but I mostly managed to stay out of trouble.”

Dozens more questions spring up in Umi’s mind. She’s torn between keeping silent in the hope that he’ll continue speaking and asking him every question that comes into her head. After struggling with herself for several seconds, she decides on the former. 

“I had a family,” he goes on, and Umi is grateful she’s kept her silence. “Parents, brothers and sisters. Guess maybe they all ended up in Soul Society,” he muses. 

The thought of it makes her incredibly sad - him being separated from a family he likely loved very much, never able to see them again. She frowns. “How did you die?” It’s a question she’s been wanting to ask for a very long time. 

“Fell into a river, got swept away by a current, and drowned,” he answers. “Well, that’s mostly true anyway. I was with one of my brothers. Goofing off when we should’ve been heading home. There was this river not far from where we lived. At different points along its path there were banks high enough to jump from. One night we were fucking around, daring each other to do this and do that, and he dared me to jump from one of the highest banks. Wasn’t a good idea to start with - it was rainy season and there had been lots of flooding - but I never was one to back down from a dare. Shucked all my clothes and jumped right in, not realizing the current was way too strong and way too fast for me to just climb out like I would’ve been able to otherwise. Add to that the fact it was dark, and I’d been swept away in a matter of seconds.” 

Horrified, Umi stares at him. “Oh my god,” she exhales, feeling tears burn at the corners of her eyes. “That’s… awful. I can’t imagine. Were you scared?”

“‘Course I was,” he laughs. “I was young and dumb, but smart enough to realize I was in a shitload of trouble. My brother couldn’t see me… probably couldn’t even hear me yelling.” He pauses. “I still wonder sometimes what that first conversation was like. What he told my folks when he went home.”

“Did you… did you suffer?” She’s afraid to hear the answer but wants to know anyway. 

“It wasn’t nice,” he tells her honestly. “The worst part about it was getting dragged under, feeling my lungs fill up til I couldn’t breathe. It was dark, and it was cold, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Damn… never thought I’d bite it this way.’” He shakes his head. “Probably only took a few minutes to kill me, but it felt like forever.

“When I woke up, I was on the bank somewhere way the hell downriver. Didn’t have a physical body anymore - guess that stayed in the river. Took a few days for me to get back home… but that was a useless trip - nobody could see or hear me.”

“So what did you do?”

“Oh, I hung around the family for a bit - few months, at least, if I’m remembering right - but it got old after a while, seeing them and not being able to talk to them. ‘Sides, everybody was always so goddamned sad all the time, it made me feel guilty. So I left. Didn’t know where I was going, but I figured wherever I’d end up would be a hell of a lot less painful than where I was.” Grimmjow chuckles wryly. “Couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Umi shifts in bed again, leaning back to rest on his thighs. “What happened?” She asks, her eyes on the ceiling. 

“I wandered around for a long time,” he starts quietly. Umi can tell by the way that he’s speaking that he’s been mentally transported back to the time he’s remembering. “Just gradually becoming less and less human. Belonging nowhere, not knowing what to do or where to go, feeling sorry for myself. Then one day I met another Hollow. He told me about Hueco Mundo, and showed me how to get there.” He pauses. “You’ve never been there, but… Kurosaki probably told you it’s not really a nice place.” 

She nods, remembering some of the things Ichigo had told her about that realm. “Yeah… he didn’t have many good things to say about it,” she confirms softly. 

“There, it’s eat or be eaten,” he goes on. “You learn quick as hell that if you wanna survive, you can’t be timid. I was always competitive,” he laughs, “but in a different way. Mostly with my brothers, or with my friends, in the way young and stupid guys usually are. But Hueco Mundo… well, that was the first time I ever felt like I was actually fighting for my life. It gets addicting after a while. That rush of devouring other people to gain strength, to become more powerful. And when I learned about the Arrancars, the Espada… I knew I had to get there.”

Umi is quiet for a long time, her thoughts buzzing with everything that he’s told her. It’s more than she ever expected to learn about him, and there is something about the way that he’s offered it so freely and willingly that touches her. “Thank you,” she says softly, looking up at him from where she’s lying in his lap. 

He looks back at her. “What for?”

“For sharing that with me,” Umi says simply. 

“Well,” he smirks, reaching down and tweaking her nipple. She squirms, and his grin widens. “One good turn deserves another, skull-face. Time for you to talk.”

“Me?” She looks up at him in surprise. “What about?”

“I just told you my fucking life story,” he chuckles. “Your turn.”

“You told me your death story,” she corrects him. “I don’t have one of those.”

“So tell me something else then. Tell me how you got your powers. Your Reiatsu.” He moves his hand down, tracing the lines of the constellation of stars she has tattooed just beneath her left breast. 

“Oh,” Umi says. She giggles a little as his fingertip ghosts briefly over a ticklish spot. “I’ve been able to feel my Reiatsu for as long as I can remember,” she starts thoughtfully. “And sometimes I wonder if I’ve always been able to feel other people’s too, but just didn’t realize that’s what I was feeling. I can recall times when I was very little, and I’d get certain… vibes from people. I think that was probably me feeling their spiritual pressure and not understanding what it was.

“But my daggers, and my fire… those were things I sort of discovered by accident, shortly after I met Ichigo.” 

“Hm,” Grimmjow says, his fingers stopping in their motion. “Don’t know if I wanna hear this story after all.”

“It’s nothing like _that,”_ she protests. “I just… whenever he would spar with Abarai-San and Chad and I got to watch, I’d sometimes go home and mimic their movements. Every once in a while, Kuchiki Rukia would be there too, and she’d try teaching Ichigo how to harness and use Kido. He was never any good at it,” she adds fondly, laughing a little. 

“Couldn’t learn Cero for shit either,” Grimmjow mumbles. 

This makes Umi laugh even more. “Anyway, I started learning Kuchiki-San’s incantations for her Kido. I honestly didn’t think anything of it, until one day I happened to be there with them while they were sparring. I went off on my own a little ways away and quietly said one of the incantations to myself, moving the way Kuchiki-San would. You can imagine my surprise when a tiny fireball came out.

“You could’ve knocked me over with a feather,” she goes on. “I was convinced it was a fluke, so I tried it again. The fireball the second time was a little bigger. I got so excited that without thinking, I rushed over to tell Ichigo - and almost got killed by his Getsuga Tenshou.”

“Idiot,” he chuckles, plucking her forehead. 

She reaches up and plucks him right back. “After that, I started learning more and more incantations. Mine isn’t exactly like Kido,” she adds, “but it’s similar… meaning some of the incantations Kuchiki-San used worked, and some I had to come up with on my own. Same with the daggers. I sort of knew I could do different things with my… whatever this not-Kido thing is, and I discovered how to form the daggers not long after the fireballs.” 

“And now look at you,” he grins. “Training hard enough to take on everyone in the Gotei Thirteen.”

“Shut up.”

“Speaking of your fireballs,” Grimmjow starts, resting his head against the headboard, “been thinking about something I wanna try.”

“Oh?” She sits up slightly, her eyes alight when she faces him. “Something new in our training sessions?”

“Not quite,” he chuckles, a cryptic look on his face. “But I’m willing to teach it to you, if you feel so inclined to learn.”

“Well, color me intrigued.”

*******

“No.”

Exasperated, he stares at her. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean exactly what I said,” Umi replies, hands on her hips. “I won’t yield on this.” 

“And why not?”

“Because if something goes wrong, it will be a lot harder to fix it on your gigai than it will on your regular body.” She shakes her head. “I’m not going to be responsible for you having to go back to… to, wherever you got this gigai from… and having to explain that you need a new one because I burned the other one beyond repair.” 

“Look---”

 _“No,”_ Umi says emphatically. 

He stares at her. “You’re too fucking stubborn.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that you know I’m right.”

“Fine, you win this one,” he grumbles. “But you should know that I feel insulted at your lack of faith in my ability to teach you how to do it without something going wrong.” 

She raises her eyebrows. “You show me how to do it the right way on your real body - which has the failsafe of your Hierro - and then we can talk about bringing your gigai into it.” Closing the distance between them in just a few steps, she puts her arms around his neck and reaches around to ruffle his hair. “I promise you that there are many, many, many things that I won’t fight you on in this setting,” she says quietly, standing on her tiptoes to kiss his neck. “But this is not one of them.”

“Tch. I said alright, didn’t I?”

“You did,” she smiles up at him. “So come out of the gigai and come into bed.” She turns away from him and moves toward the bed, but not before he’s had the chance to lay a firm slap on her bare ass. The impact of his open palm against her skin makes her gasp, and she whirls back around to face him, face flushed. “What was that for?”

“Just felt like it,” he grins. “Never been good at resisting temptation, and it just looked too perfect not to.”

“We… are gonna explore that at some point,” she intones. 

Two pale blue eyebrows go up. “Oh? Are we?”

Umi’s face flushes again. “Yes. As in, explore more of it.”

“Hm.” It’s all he’ll say as he leaves the bedroom, but there is a telltale smirk on his face.

Umi waits patiently for him on the bed. When he returns, he’s shed his gigai. There is only one difference in the physical appearance between his gigai and his normal body: his hollow hole. Her eyes follow him as he approaches the bed, and once again, her curiosity gets the better of her. “Do you feel things in your hollow hole?”

“Depends,” he says, the bed depressing as he joins her on it. “On what - or who - is touching it.” He rolls onto his back, propping his head up with his arms and turning to face her. “You curious?”

“Always,” she laughs. 

“Funny, since I’m curious, too.” His bright blue eyes study her for a moment. “Go ahead - touch it if you want.”

“Really?” The tone of her voice is uncertain, but her hand is already closing the distance between them, moving almost of its own volition. She stops it just before it makes contact with his skin, palm hovering above the perfect circle. When she looks up at him again, he nods. She lowers her hand slowly, until her fingertips meet the skin around the edge of the hole. She circles the area gently, running over it like she would run her fingers over the rim of a glass.

It catches him off-guard - the way he can feel her Reiatsu just beneath the surface of her fingertips, its gentle energy pulsing into the skin around his hollow hole. He has felt many different things in that space depending on who and what touches it, but this is new for him. It’s never been as sensitive as it is now, and the rush of feeling makes him draw in a sharp breath. 

Umi looks up at him in alarm, stilling her fingers. “Does that hurt?”

“No,” he shakes his head. “But I do feel it. Never felt this way before.”

Curious, she inclines her head to the side. “Like what?”

He laughs a little, feeling his already half-hard cock twitch when she starts to trace the hole with her fingertips again. “Kinda like it does when you rub the head of my dick.”

Umi’s eyes are drawn to that aforementioned part of him, and she smiles a little, watching the correlation between where she’s touching him and his blood rushing south. She increases the flow of her Reiatsu just a tiny bit, channeling it into her fingertips, and his cock all but jumps. “Ohhh,” she says softly, feeling her own body respond to the very obvious evidence of his arousal. “I could get used to this.” 

“Well don’t,” he replies, catching her wrist in his hand and stopping her movement. “At least not yet. I still have something to teach you, hm?”

“Ah, right.” She pauses. “But you promise we can come back to this?”

He doesn’t know why her question - and the way she’s asking it - strikes him as so funny. “Yeah,” he chuckles. “I promise.” 


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Oh, you want me to continue?" Umi looks at him coyly through lowered lashes. "I'd love to," she goes on, her voice oozing feigned innocence. "But you haven't been very vocal about your pleasure, so I thought maybe you haven't been enjoying it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Smut ahead. Also playing with fire (in the literal sense and probably the figurative sense as well, hehe).

“I think I finally get the appeal.” She utters the words quietly, her voice barely above a whisper. 

He looks up at her from where he’s sprawled, bright blue eyes a little bit hazy and unfocused. His arms are bound with rope above his head, but Umi knows that the restraint is just a formality. If Grimmjow really wanted to, he could flick his wrist and put the double-knotted rope in tatters in a matter of seconds… just as easily as he could strengthen his Hierro and make his skin immune to what she’s doing. 

He doesn’t though, and it’s part of what makes Umi understand the appeal. She knows what it feels like to crave being on the receiving end of this - being taken control of, being subjected to pain, willingly putting her trust in the person inflicting the pain. Having now tasted what it’s like to be on the giving end, she understands the rush that comes with having this amount of control in the palms of her hands. 

She knows he’s heard what she said, and her lips twitch up in a smile as she watches him struggle to refocus and comprehend the meaning of her words. There’s a part of her that feels a little guilty for dragging him out of the dual zone of his pain and pleasure, a little twinge of remorse at casting this unnecessary interruption into his bubble. She decides to make it up to him. 

_ “U… Mi,” _ she whispers, the syllables coinciding with the way her index finger is moving. She uses it to write the radicals that make up her name, sending a little burst of flame accompanied by reishi with each stroke. Transfixed, she watches the muscles beneath his skin tremble every time her finger touches him. It sends a little ripple of delight through her, thinking about how for the time being, this incredibly powerful man has relinquished the control of his body to her, trusting her to master the skill it takes to successfully blur the boundary between pleasure and pain. 

_ I wonder if he knows how pretty he is like this.  _

And he’s certainly a sight: arms stretched above his head, bound together and to the headboard, pulling the well-sculpted muscles of his chest and abdomen taut against his pale skin. His whole body is flushed, dewy with a sheen of sweat that is likely both from his efforts to keep himself in check and from the heat of Umi’s flames. It somehow makes his eyes and the turquoise marks below them look brighter. She lets her gaze travel lower, following the trajectory of her finger as she moves it over his hollow hole. She breaks contact with his skin briefly, then brings her hand back to trace the edge of that perfectly-formed circle. His cock is so hard Umi wonders if it hurts - all that blood pushing into one space, steady dribble of precum trailing down the side. 

“U...Mi,” she whispers again, reforming those radicals in tiny patterns into the skin around his hollow hole. Grimmjow squeezes his eyes shut tightly, a strangled noise escaping his throat. His eyes fly open again when she pulls her fingers away from him, and the indignation there is enough to make her laugh. 

“Oh, you want me to continue?” Umi looks at him coyly through lowered lashes. “I’d love to,” she goes on, her voice oozing feigned innocence. “But you haven’t been very vocal about your pleasure, so I thought maybe you haven’t been enjoying it.” 

His eyes narrow dangerously, and just for a moment Umi thinks he might pop his restraints and hand her ass to her for the sass she’s giving him. He doesn’t, though. He simply flashes her a more subdued version of his signature cocky grin, tongue flicking out to lick his lips suggestively. “You’re gonna get it later,” he rasps, and the promise sends a full-body shudder through her. 

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” she trills. “But it’s your turn now, and since I’m the one in the driver’s seat, I’m making the rules at the moment.” She pauses, leaning over to lick a drop of sweat between his pectorals. “And I’d like to hear you yell.” 

“Fucking prickteaser,” he grinds out. “You wanna hear me yell, then make me.”

“Challenge accepted,” Umi murmurs, gracing him with a sweet smile. She returns to her abandoned ministrations, pressing her finger back to the skin around his hollow hole and applying a little more of her Reiatsu to the flames that come out of her fingertip. 

_ “Fuuuuuuuuuck,”  _ he groans loudly, muscles shaking with the effort to keep his composure. 

“Better,” Umi praises him, “but still not quite enough.” She taps her chin with the fingers of her hand not currently pressed to his skin. “Let’s see what I can do to remedy that.” She shifts herself on the bed, moving from his side to straddle his thighs, effectively pinning him in place. He realizes what she’s doing just before she does it, his hips bucking slightly beneath her. 

“Relax,” she whispers, bending over until her mouth is just centimeters from his throbbing, leaking cock. She keeps her hand on his abdomen, resuming the spelling of her name in flames around his hollow hole, and she uses her other hand to grip him tightly - squeezing hard enough for it to hurt - before sliding her tongue up the underside of his dick in a long, slow lick. She catches the trail of precum as she goes, making a show of savoring the taste of it and swirling the tip of her tongue around his slit. 

He growls and bucks his hips again, this time hard enough to lift her slightly. 

Umi tightens her grip on him, eliciting a sharp gasp from him. “You promised you would let me have my fun,” she reminds him. “We both know you could break those restraints and force yourself out of this position if you wanted to… and you know what word to use if you want me to do it for you.” She pauses. “But we also both know you don’t want to. So please behave.”

When his hips have stilled, she flashes him another sweet smile and resumes her motions - one hand still fire-fleshing the hypersensitive skin around his hollow hole, the other holding him steady as she uses her tongue to tease him, keeping him just at the edge of orgasm. He starts off maintaining his tenuous hold on control - out of spite, Umi thinks - but the longer she goes on, the more she feels that control slip. It amazes her that he can let himself be taken apart like this and still keep from breaking his restraints. 

Also, the longer she goes on, the noisier he gets. The crescendo of guttural moans and streams of “fuck, fuuuck…  _ fuuuuuuck _ ” that come out of his mouth with every turn of her wrist and every flick of her tongue makes Umi wish she had a hand free to take care of the ache between her own legs. Grimmjow’s moaning is hot, hotter than she imagined it would be, and she finds herself squirming at every sound he makes. 

Umi decides to up the ante a bit, pulsing reishi into the hand wrapped around his length and letting tiny sparks alight on her palm. It only takes once. Grimmjow actually  _ yelps,  _ and it is the only warning she gets before his cock twitches in her palm. He bucks his hips up off of the bed, thrusting into her hand as he comes all over her chin and chest. A surprised squeak escapes her, but before she can properly process what’s happened, he has snapped the ropes she so carefully tied around his wrists. 

_ “Haru,”  _ he growls. It is the word that signals her time in control has ended. The world flips on its axis very quickly and Umi finds herself looking at the ceiling, her back flat on the mattress and Grimmjow hovering above her. 

“Well?” She grins up at him. “How did I do, Sensei?”

“Best student I’ve ever had,” he smirks back at her. He reaches a hand out, running his thumb along her collarbone. It’s a light touch, but it still makes Umi shudder. “More than that, I like this look on you. Maybe I’ll keep you covered in my come all the time.”

“You---” Whatever she’d been intending to say is cut off abruptly when he snatches her thighs up in his hands, hiking them up high over his shoulders. Umi scrabbles for purchase at the sheets, feeling her world shift again as everything but her shoulders gets lifted off the bed. 

_ “Blue,”  _ she gasps sharply when she feels his mouth on her. Her eyelids flutter shut as she’s promptly assaulted with a rush of feeling. His tongue is buried in her slit, his nose rubbing against her clit with every lick, and the fragment of his Hollow mask is scraping against her inner thigh. The rough slide of the jawbone against her soft skin, Umi thinks, is a nice way to keep her tethered to reality, a way to keep her from floating off into the cosmos as Grimmjow practically devours her. 

It’s beautifully filthy: the wet slurping sounds he’s making as he laps up every bit of moisture pooled inside of her; the way she’s squirming and near-shrieking in his arms; the way he raises those bright blue eyes to look at her every now and again, fucking her with his gaze as much as his tongue is doing with her most intimate parts. Getting him off has already led her halfway to orgasm, and it doesn’t take much maneuvering on the part of Grimmjow’s very skilled mouth to drag her the rest of the way there. She comes spectacularly, shaking and spasming and keening in a pitch so high she’s sure she must be summoning all the stray dogs in the neighborhood. He tongues her through it, her pitch going unbelievably higher as that first orgasm is followed not long after by a second one. 

Still he keeps going, and Umi sees white spots dancing at the edge of her vision. She’s so overstimulated that she blanks, just for a second, on how to pronounce the word in her head. She can see it very clearly: she knows how it’s spelled, and what it means, and the hue that it evokes.  _ Sunshine and daffodils. _ She squirms in his arms, stretching her hand out to the part of him that she can reach - his forearm - and taps on it twice with her index finger. 

_ Yellow _ . 

Grimmjow slows the movement of his tongue, peering down at her. What he sees fills him with a sort of pride. Umi is positively wrecked, her chest and part of her face covered in his come, cheeks flushed and tearstained. 

“Gorgeous,” he pronounces. “Absolutely fucking gorgeous.” He quirks an eyebrow at her. “You need me to stop?”

The reprieve he’s given her has let her gather her wits, and she takes a split second to think about it. “Yes,” she breathes finally, her chest heaving with the exertion of trying to keep her oxygen levels even. “I… I know you can keep going, and I would love to say I want you to,” she says, catching her bottom lip between her teeth in a way that has his cock stirring all over again. “But I think I need… a little bit of a break.”

“You got it,” he grins, pressing a surprisingly tender kiss to the inside of her abused thigh before gently lowering her legs back to the bed. “Sorry about the mask,” he says sheepishly, indicating his Hollow fragment. “Got a little carried away.”

“It’s okay,” she laughs. “It was a nice counterbalance to the other thing you were doing.”

“The ‘other thing’ I was doing?” He teases her. “It has a name, you know.”

“Yeah. I think it’s called ‘eating me out like I was your last meal.’” 

He slides up into the sheets beside her. “Guess if that was my last meal,” he starts thoughtfully, pulling her towards him and pressing her hips against his, “I could die happy.” He reaches out, brushing a strand of sweaty hair out of her heavy-lidded eyes. “You need a bath.”

“Hmph,” she mutters. “Whose idea was it to come all over me?”

“Mine,” he laughs, and Umi doesn’t know why the way the word falls out of his mouth makes her feel a warm tightness in the pit of her stomach. It’s a feeling she hasn’t felt in a very long time - something that she can’t quite remember; a long-forgotten sensation connected to something. A fulfilled longing, perhaps. 

Before she can dwell on it for too much longer, Grimmjow has left the bed, taking that deliciously distinctive coolness of his body with him. In the next moment, he scoops her up in his arms, and Umi squeals. “What the hell are you doing, you walnut?”

“Putting you in the bath,” he answers, hoisting her over his shoulder as if she’s a bag of rice. She flails around for a bit, and he uses the hand not holding her steady to place a sound smack to the swell of her buttock. “Be  _ still,” _ he advises her. “Unless you want me to drop you.” 

Umi grumbles playfully, but stills her movement as he carries her into the bathroom. 


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You really have to ask? You know what that is." She laughs sheepishly, trailing her fingers through the steamy water. "Just another mistake in my relationship with him." She pauses. "My only consolation for this permanent eyesore is the fact that he has one too."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Little bit of smut, lot of feelings.

_12:31 am_

**_Hey, Umi._ **

**_Just checking in to make sure_ **

**_you’re still okay._ **

**_I know you don’t really want_ **

**_me in your business, but it’s_ **

**_kind of hard to shake old habits,_ **

**_you know?_ **

She stares at the two messages for a long time after they come through, trying to make sense of them. _Hard to shake old habits indeed,_ Umi thinks wryly. _It’s been months since that night. Months since Orihime helped me break that powerful, invisible connection to him. And still… the minute he texts me, my heart goes into overdrive again thinking about what it means._

“Gonna text him back?” Grimmjow’s voice breaks into her thoughts. “Tell him I’ve been holding you hostage here, tying you up and forcing you to fuck me?” 

She sets the phone facedown on the bath cabinet. “Shouldn’t have brought my phone in here,” she says, shaking her head. “One of these days I’m gonna accidentally drop it in the tub, and then I’ll be sorry.” Water sloshes against the side of the bathtub as she leans back into him, resting her head on his chest once more. 

After a period of silence, Grimmjow speaks again. “Tell me about this,” he requests, his hand tapping her hip beneath the water. She knows what he’s asking about. It isn’t the hip itself, but the art that’s been tattooed there: a tiny black sword with blue flames around it. 

“You really have to ask? You know what that is.” She laughs sheepishly, trailing her fingers through the steamy water. “Just another mistake in my relationship with him.” She pauses. “My only consolation for this permanent eyesore is the fact that he has one too.”

He peers around to look at her. “Eh?”

“Yeah,” she confirms. “It was my idea, if you can believe that. Exact same art, exact same spot on his body. You’ll probably think it sounds awfully childish and petty of me, but for a long time after he left, I would console myself thinking of that tattoo… and how every time he’s naked with her, she’ll see it.”

Grimmjow chuckles. “You’ve got a vicious streak.”

She shrugs. “I guess… although it was less about being vicious and more about being vindictive in a way,” she explains thoughtfully. “It was more like, ‘no matter how small it is, this is a part of him that will always belong to me. Orihime can’t touch this part of him.’ Although by now, I’m sure she’s figured out a way to undo even that with her powers.” 

“You think she would do that?”

“You don’t think she would?”

“Nah… she doesn’t strike me as that type of woman.” 

Something about the assured way he says it gives Umi pause. It makes her feel a little ashamed of herself. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she sighs. “She’s nothing like me. She’s kind, and gentle, and good-hearted. And it probably wouldn’t bother her anyway, because he belongs to her now.”

The sound of the water splashing is the only warning she gets before he’s reached around and plucked her forehead. 

“Ow!” She turns her head to face him, giving him a dirty look. “The hell was that for?”

“Thought it might knock some of the stupid out of your brain,” he grumbles. To Umi’s surprise, he looks genuinely annoyed. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I thought I was a jealous fuck,” he starts, his pale blue eyebrows furrowed deeply into a frown. “But you’re on a whole different level, skull-face. You keep talking about her like she’s some goddess on some unreachable pedestal. Like she’s so much better than you just because she happened to end up with Kurosaki in the end.” He shakes his head. “You gonna spend your whole life bitching and moaning about how he chose her over you?”

His words shoot straight through her chest, rendering her momentarily speechless. Umi feels her cheeks flush with anger and embarrassment. Without a word, she stands up and climbs out of the tub, draping herself in a towel before leaving him there in the bathroom.

*******

Umi knows what he’s said is the truth, and that he’s not wrong. Still, human nature has made her balk at it - this exposition of her ugly feelings. Grimmjow has only done what she needed someone to do: to try and break her out of the cycle she’s been in for years, that cycle of self-doubt, jealousy, and regret. 

“Yo,” Grimmjow calls to her from the doorway. “You still mad about what I said?”

She doesn’t turn to look at him. “I wasn’t mad,” she protests quietly. 

“Yeah you were,” he rebuts. “You flew outta there like I’d set your ass on fire.” He moves past the threshold of her bedroom door and plants himself in front of her. “You might not wanna give me credit for knowing you pretty well by now, but I do.” He pauses, lifting her chin to make her look at him. “You were mad.”

“I wasn’t mad at you,” she sighs, her eyes sliding away from him briefly. “Well, maybe a little. Because you called me out.”

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “You don’t like that, huh? Tch. Too bad. I’m not gonna apologize for telling you what you needed to hear.”

“I didn’t ask you to apologize,” she snaps. 

He chuckles. “Okay, yeah… I called you out. And what else?”

Her eyes flicker back to him briefly. “And nothing.” She sighs. “You just… you make it sound so simple for me to get rid of these feelings that I’ve been carrying around for years. Not my feelings for Ichigo,” she adds quickly, “although that’s part of it. But… well, it’s everything else, too. How I feel about what happened between him and me. And how I feel about Orihime. I’ve spent a lot of time stuck in this constant cycle of bad feelings that it’s hard to let go of that. But you make it sound like I should be able to snap my fingers and make everything I feel go away.”

Grimmjow is staring at her incredulously. “That’s what you think I want you to do?”

“Well isn’t it?”

“The fuck do you think I am, Umi?” He huffs. “I was human once too. Being what I am now doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten how stupidly complicated human emotions can be.” He looks her straight in the eye. “Do you think I would’ve called you out if I felt like it was easy for you to forget your feelings?”

“I--I don’t know,” she says uncertainly. 

_“Tch._ Well… seems like I know you, but you don’t know me,” he mumbles. “Imagine that. Fine, then. I’ll help you understand.” He shakes his head. “You say you’ve been stuck in this cycle of bad feelings, ever since Kurosaki left you. Right?”

Umi nods. 

“Why? Why were you stuck? Setting aside the matter of how he fucked up with his Reiatsu, tell me why you were stuck in that cycle.” 

She considers his question for a moment, not quite sure what he’s getting at or where the line of questioning is leading. “I honestly don’t know.”

“He never gave you a clear explanation for why he left,” Grimmjow says. “In typical dumbass fashion, he did things that way because he thought it was better for you if you didn’t know. But tell me, Umi. If you had to guess the reason, what would you think?”

“That he left because he never really wanted to be with me in the first place,” she admits. “Or rather,” she adds, after considering her words, “it isn’t that he didn’t want to be with me. Maybe it’s just that he always loved her more, and he wanted her more.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I’m not making excuses for him, but he thought telling you that would make things worse. So he didn’t. Problem is,” he goes on, “it didn’t work the way he thought it would, because you’re smarter and a lot more perceptive than maybe he gave you credit for. You figured it out anyway, and it’s what started your whole cycle of bad feelings. Am I wrong?”

“No,” she shakes her head. 

“You thought you knew, but you weren’t sure, because he never said. So you’ve spent all this time trying to figure out what the hell you did wrong, never coming to any satisfying conclusion, and still dealing with that problem you didn’t know about - being linked to him through his spiritual pressure. You took a fucking _hit,_ Umi. Do you understand how deep that is?” Without waiting for her answer, he goes on. “I may have belittled you for it in the beginning, but I wouldn’t now. Not when I’ve seen what the whole thing did to you. So I called you out, not to make you angry or to mess with your head, but to make you see that Kurosaki choosing her doesn’t mean she’s more special than you are. ‘Cause I don’t think you’ve had anybody tell you that. And maybe if someone had told you that a long time ago, it might’ve done you some good.”

She covers her face with her hands and bursts into tears. 

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Thought so.”

*******

_2:06 am_

**_Hi, Ichigo._ **

**_Thanks for checking on me._ **

**_I’m actually doing fine._ **

**_In case you were wondering_ **

**_(which you probably are),_ **

**_Grimmjow is still here._ **

**_It’s fine, though…_ **

**_I think we’ve been good_ **

**_for each other._ **

“So nothing about the sex, huh?” He chuckles, nuzzling the shell of her ear. “I’m a little disappointed. I expected you to go into a full speech about how much better in bed I am than he was.”

She shoots him another dirty look, leaning over to put her phone on the nightstand. “That’s nobody’s business but ours.”

He pulls her back into him, her skin flush against his. “Yeah, guess you’re right,” he concedes. “Still, though,” he teases her with a smirk, “would’ve been nice for him to know there’s something I’m better at.”

“And how do you know you’re better?” She sasses him.

“Heh.” The sound is muffled into the skin of her throat as he drags his lips down her neck. It’s all she gets as an answer, but isn’t given much time to dwell on it when he slips his hand between her thighs. Finding her already wet, he chuckles. “That seems like a stupid question, don’t you think?” 

He’s still trailing kisses down the side of her neck, and she leans her head back on his shoulder to give him better access. “I underestimated you,” she says quietly, exhaling at the feel of him slipping a finger inside of her. 

“Hm?” Languidly, he withdraws his finger, circling her entrance with his fingertip. “Underestimated me?”

“You’re rude and crass and abrasive,” Umi laughs, a little breathlessly - after all, he has slipped his finger back inside of her, curling it into her walls. “And you’ve been that way since you walked into my bar months ago.”

“Don’t know if this is all leading somewhere different,” Grimmjow interjects, adding another finger to the first. “Or if you just plan to keep insulting me while I’m knuckles-deep in you.” 

“Nn--” The strangled sound comes out of her when he brushes said knuckles against her clit. “N-no, I was going somewhere with it,” she breathes. “I wanted to say that… _hng…_ I’m…” She pauses, huffing out a sigh. “It’s _really_ hard to concentrate on my thoughts w-when you, _hah,_ oh… f- _fuck_ … when you twist your fingers like that…”

“Too bad,” he whispers, mouthing at her neck again. “‘Cause I’m not stopping and I’d really like to hear where you were going with that train of thought.” 

Umi takes a deep breath in an effort to keep her brain from short-circuiting when his fingers start to move again. “B-but just because you - _ahh…_ just because y-you’re rude and crass and abrasive doesn’t mean you, you, you…”

“Yeah? I-I-I, what?” He’s teasing her. 

_“Itdoesn’tmeanyoudon’tcare,”_ she says it all in a rush, determined to get the words out before she completely loses herself in the feeling of his fingers buried deep inside of her. 

Grimmjow says nothing while he continues stroking her with his fingers. She comes quietly: her legs trembling, taking deep shuddering breaths and going boneless in his arms. 

“You’re right,” he agrees, withdrawing his fingers from her. “Guess the secret’s out.”

She looks up at him from where her head is resting against his shoulder. “Thanks for letting me cry it out.”

It makes him chuckle. “Wasn’t what I meant when I said I wanted to make you cry,” he smirks down at her. “But there’s time for the other kind of crying. Think you needed this kind more.”

“Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez,” she says, words muffled around a mouthful of yawn. “The only Hollow with a heart.”

“Shut up and go to sleep.” The words are harsh but the tone is fond, and Umi smiles a little as she drifts off. 


End file.
